I am a freelance Infrastructure Architect by trade and have been finding the logistics of organising this quite difficult as I am out of the UK a lot. In the last 12 months I have quit full time work, gone to India for a month, worked in Libya, Dubai, Holland and Kent, moved to Manchester from Liverpool and am now working in London, not to mention a US road trip and holidays in the Czech Republic and Russia.

Fortunately a client of mine has allowed me to use their office for the test build and will be arranging shipping for the pods. I am heading over there tomorrow to do the test build and will be shipping in the days after.

In future I am going to:

• Charge a bit more for the cases
• Move away from the no-profit consortium approach
• Not take payment in advance of the fabrication
• Prep some in advance and sell them with all bar disks
• Still allow custom runs of cases if people want quite a few

I will have a think about a pricing structure and update people here soon.

Here are the pods on the pallet:-

Tom

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay in updating the site, I have been in Dubai deploying VMware View 4 for a client there.

We are going to schedule a run of 10 of the Storage Pods in Matt Black as a proof of concept so they will be at the £400+P&P previously announced. If you want to get involved please get in touch. The timing is dependent on the lead time for the Port Multipliers from Chun Fan, I will keep you posted.

Port Multipliers
Chun Fan have bulk pricing on the Port Multipliers as follows:
200pcs US40
150pcs US41
100pcs US42
50pcs US43
40pcs US43.5
30pcs US44
20pcs US44.5
10pcs US45
5pcs US45.5
1pc US46
So if people want us to organise those as well, its 9*$43+P&P+Tax (total TBC) on top of the case price.

We have looked around for UK suppliers for the other parts to build the Pods and if people want us to handle the purchase of all the components, please let us know and we can bulk order.

Power Switch
Bulgin Orange Dot Lighted Vandal Proof Switch

PSU / PSU Molex Cable
Enermax Modu82+ 525W
Modular Molex x3
I am tempted to go for a 1250 Watt one to save space and have less to go wrong (obviously peak draw might be a problem), also I cant find a mobo stub to allow a second PSU to power on without a mobo.

2 Port PCIe SATA II Card
Unbranded from Span – £14.10

4 Port PCI SATA II Card
Unbranded from Span – £49.70

I think depending on the chipset, this 4-port PCI-e card could be a good alternative.

SATA II Cable
100cm Akasa AK-CB056 Right angle connector SATA II cable inc Latch connector – Red/Black, scan £1.87

Incidentals
I will be sourcing a bulk load of these from the US and can pass them along to people :
Nylon Screws
HD Anti-Vibration Sleeves
Nylon Backplane Standoffs

Vibration / Noise
120mm x 38mm Fan (x6)
Scythe Ultra Kaze 2000RPM 120 x 38mm Cooling Fan
(Backblaze use Mechatronics G1238M12B1-FSR 120 x 38 mm 2,800 RPM 12V Fan, but I could not find one, pretty sure this will shift as much air)

Power Supply Vibration Dampener
Vantec VDK-PSU Power Supply Vibration Dampener (2) – Tekheads, £1.76

Fan Mount (front)
Acousti Ultra Soft Anti-Vibration Fan Mount AFM02

Fan Mount (middle)
Acousti Ultra Soft Anti-Vibration Fan Mount AFM03

Foam Rubber Pad
16″ x 17″ x 1/8″ Foam Rubber Pad, ~£1.50 from twfoam

Mobo/CPU/RAM
To your own taste really, Id like to get one with 5xPCI-e to avoid the 4x PCI card.

Hard Disks
Sticking with the Backblaze recommendation and getting the low power Seagate drives is probably a good idea
Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB Hard Drive SATAII 5900rpm 32MB Cache – OEM (Ebuyer) £109.95 inc VAT **UPDATE 12 APRIL**

Hope this saves people some time searching the net.
Tom

We have had contact from a few people so far and will be scheduling the first run in April.
The colour of the first run will be “Black fine texture powdercoated” as that was the default and cheapest. Custom runs can be a different colour if you are prepared to pay more.

Please get in touch if you want to get in on this initial run.

- Tom

We have just got those prices for the cases, if you want to have a run of your own we can schedule separately for the prices below.
I assumed that people would want to club together and try to access the lower prices for a combined bulk order, I would like to do the first in 1 month (deadline to join is April 1st)

10 = £400
20 = £350
50 = £300
100 = £275

(These may shift down slightly but I am assured they will not go up and they do not include postage. They are all less than the $700 BackBlaze listed for Protocase)

Please send mail to tom@tthuk.com with

• Who you are
• How many cases you want
• At what price you would buy in at (ie if you want some but only if we reach a certain price point)

I have a VAT registered, UK limited company I will be invoicing from for these and can arrange shipping anywhere in the EU.

• 

Having looked at the backblaze pod they have done a very god job of making the unit affordable and functional. It is hard to find anywhere to remove cost.

I have made only 1 change so far which is more for manufacture than anything else. The company we will be using for manufacture primarily use punching machines rather than laser cutters. To allow for this i have removed the Backblaze Logo and removed the venting pattern from the fan mounts. For ease these will be replaced with after market wire grills.

Removing the laser detail and adapting the design for punching does have other advantages. The punching machines can work a lot faster than the Laser cutters. This means that it costs less to produce each item once the initial set up has been completed.

On orders of about 10 units plus we should see a cost saving over the price from Protocase listed on the backblaze blog.

I will upload solid models soon to show the changes made to the fan grills (even though this is only a very minor change)

I have completed the manufacturing 2D manufacturuing drawings and we should have final prices for the units within the next 2 weeks.