I started beefing up the storage for my Plex server a few months ago. My home server is built in a random mid-size tower case I had laying around. After getting to 4 3.5" drive, I ran out of physical space to add anymore drives.
This led to wanting to build a JBOD enclosure. For some reason though, they’re all relatively expensive for what equates to a metal box.
So, I instead decided to 3D print one with plenty of space for expansion. I landed on designing it around using a standard ATX PSU, 16 3.5" drives, four 120mm fans for cooling, and space for SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 converter cards.
Designing the case was fairly straight forward, albeit pretty time consuming. The real challenge though was breaking it into parts that would fit on the print beds of my Bambu X1s. I ended up using mortise and tenon style joinery to interlock the bottoms and sides along with half-laps with dowel style joints to join the side panels together.
I was finally able to get it together enough to be used and put it into service today. I’m using an ESP based relay to turn the PSU on with the ESP being powered by the standby 5V pin off the PSU. The drives are connected to the converter card with an SFF-8087 to SATA cable. The drive connection is carried to the server through an SFF-8088 cable and a PCIE LSI HBA card.
I still have to print the lid and make some tweaks to the 3D model before doing a more extensive writeup and posting the model to Printables.
