Wooden FireWire Enclosure for Naked Drives

Data always expands to fill the container. I found, mostly thanks to BitTorrent, that my harddrive was getting full, so I decided to buy an external FireWire drive enclosure with with a then roomy 80GB drive. I then ran out of space and purchased a second drive at 160GB. I decided that opening the enclosure up, swapping the cables, changing the screws that hold the drive to the enclosure and closing the enclosure was too much work, so I created a wooden enclosure that could accept a drive with out any cable attachment.

Construction

• FireWire drive enclosure
• hardboard
• small screws and nails
• ribbon
• harddisk mating connector (I got mine from My Cable Shop. The spacing for Western Digital disks is different than Maxtor.)

I basically made a box with a nice slot to fit a harddrive without any covering and closed in all of the power supply and controller circuitry. I then put the mating connector at the back of the slot and connected the controller to the mating connector. I secured the ribbon to the front edge of the slot. When I shove the disk in, the ribbon goes underneath, around the back and over the top. To eject the disk, I can just yank the ribbon.

Here you can see the power supply on the bottom, the FireWire-ATA bridge in the top right and the hot-swap plate connected to it.

This is the hot-swap plate. It's one nice connector that meshes all the pins on the drive.

Here is the drive before it goes in and connects with the plate. The white ribbon gets snaked around the back of the drive in the void space between the power connector and the IDE connector.

The fan in my original enclosure had flaked out. I had been using the enclosure disassembled without a fan and neither the power supply nor the drive became hot to the touch. I decided that I should be able to put together a fanless enclosure. My first attempt got the drive hot to the touch, so I went and put holes in places that would hopefully draw cool air from underneath the enclosure pass it over the power supply and exhaust it. Similarly, other holes bring air from underneath, over the controller and along the top of the drive. I had felt feet to keep the drive slightly off the desk. This still wasn't enough, so I had to add a fan. I went rummaging at A-1 Electronics through the box that said Small Fans. I took the smallest one to the front and asked the guy if he had any smaller and he pulled out a box labeled Tiny Fans.

Now it's easy to swap drives. This is bad though because I will now just keep downloading stuff.