Geekish things II: Making a good case

[unixronin]

...No, not a legal case.  Fortunately.

This is a Dell Powervault 110T external tape drive.  It has an IBM LTO1 drive in it.  But the LTO1 drive failed.  I got hold of an LTO2 drive to replace it, but the Dell case's power supply isn't adequate to power the LTO2 drive.  Besides, well, frankly, this housing is a pain to open and close, and isn't the best design ever.  Too many breakable plastic tabs and latches that don't latch securely.

(Oddly, although it looks bright blue in this photo, it's actually black.)

I tried installing the LTO2 as an internal drive in babylon5, but it didn't like that at all.  Even after I replaced all of the case fans (several of which were failing), the drive complained that it's too warm for it inside babylon5's case.

But, I also had a Dell tape library module ... with its own internal power supply, a proprietary power connector that I can't find any specs on anywhere to figure out what voltages to put on what pins, and a dead cooling fan.  In fact, as far as I can tell, the dead cooling fan is why it got parted out.

---

So, out with the old, in with the new.  These are the internal parts of the Dell library module, and the shell of an old spare ATX power supply that I had lying around that I don't trust to power an entire PC any more.  That green board at the front is a connector board that ties everything together, and I have no idea what the logic on it does — probably talks to the tape library itself.  The white connector on the left end of that is the proprietary connector I mentioned above; it looks almost exactly like an ATX power connector, except for having a flared quick-mate shell and only 18 pins (instead of 20 or 24 for ATX).

---

The internals of that ATX power supply just about fit into the library module housing, with the fan removed. But the fan was dead anyway, remember?  A set of adhesive rubber feet make nice standoffs to keep the board from shorting to the case, and a couple of globs of RTV silicone go a good job of mounting the board securely to them.

---

There's just enough room to tuck all the unneeded cables out of the way and still have clearance on all sides between the new power board and the installed tape drive.  The opening where the original power connector came through on the end of its board was just about the right width to put an IEC power socket into to plug in an industry-standard power cable.  A replacement fan, not installed yet in this photo, ends up mounted on the outside of the fan cutout you can see at left rear of the photo, blowing cool air into the case instead of drawing warm air out.

---

And lo!  A shiny new and nicely industrial-looking external LTO2 drive housing.  Subsequent use has shown that this one works fine, with no power fluctuations and no overheating issues.  The game plan is now to put this drive on its own host with a dedicated point-to-point gigabit connection to the main server, and publish the drive to the server as an iSCSI target over the gigabit link, which will let me have the drive physically inside the house in a fairly controlled environment, yet logically attached to the storage daemon on the main server out in the deckhouse (which at different times of year gets variously too cold, too humid, and probably too warm for a high-speed tape drive to run in).

---

Comments

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

HMM. Looks legal to me. ;)

The iSCSI link to a controlled environment is a great notion. I love re-purposing old hardware, but it's been quite some time since I used external storage that wasn't more or less its own CPU. Downsizing, I guess, but my old SCSI cases went through 3 or 4 transitions before transitioning to the scrap heap.

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Of course, your photo weirdness on the first one [black case that appears blue] reminded me that I still want to take the case from my old SmartModem 2400 and get it anodized in a nice eggplant. It'd be an interesting wall decoration.