Hey all! This is my first post here, and I wanted to share with everyone what I did to a mini-ITX case. It took me only a couple days to get to where I am now, and there may be a few more little things I want to do to it in the future. Basically I took THIS case, hacked the innards out, and made a hard drive bracket out of a piece of aluminium. The bracket can currently hold five 3.5 inch hard drives, and there is space for maybe one more and possibly a 2.5 inch drive. The problem I am having (and I knew about it going in to the project) is that all the hard drives overlap the space where the motherboard will reside by approximately a quarter to half inch. And they will be above the motherboard by about a quarter to half inch as well. So I have been searching for many hours looking for a motherboard that has the bare minimum along the back edge of the board. Most of the ones I would like have the DIMM slots back there, or near there, or vertical CMOS battery there, or some other layout that will not work. I am not too worried about the main 24-pin power connector, because I have found a right angle one that I can use. Only problem with that is I have to unsolder the original one and solder the right angle one on. I am decent at soldering, so I am not really concerned about that. I have an AM2 processor sitting on my desk, and I really wanted to use that, but I cannot find an AM2 or AM3 mini-ITX motherboard that has enough space along the back edge. In fact, I have found only two available motherboards, both on amazon. The next option was to go socket 1155, but that was getting a bit out of my budget. If anyone has a suggestion for an 1155 mini-ITX board with clearance along the back edge, let me know. I then looked at the FM1/FM2 boards, and couldn't find a good match there either. Then I looked at the boards with the integrated processors; Atom and AMD's APUs. I think I have found a winner in the E-350. THIS board seems to have enough clearance along the back edge as long as I use a couple right angle SATA cables and solder the right angle 24-pin power connector. But I don't know if the E-350 is going to be powerful enough, and I hate that there is no upgradability. TL: DR I hacked a m-ITX case to be able to stuff 5 or 6 hard drives in it, and am now searching for the perfect motherboard for it. I will try to post as many pictures as I can of the process. Thanks for feedback and suggestions!
HERE is a gallery of the case as I was working on it, in reverse order. EDIT I grabbed my unused Atom/Ion board I had laying around to test fitment, and ran into a pretty big snag. I can only fit three 3.5 inch drive in the case. And they are very, very tight. They sit on top of a couple capacitors and chokes. The rest simply do not fit, because of the the 24-pin power plug. There is absolutely no room to move them forward or up, so they just will not fit. Even if I get that right angle plug they still will not fit. So I will be looking at making a couple 2.5 inch brackets to mount drives horizontal. If I do it right I can fit like 16 of the little buggers in there.
