Well, John told me what “fixings” I needed to buy, but then went on holiday!
Dirk at Skye-IT called and said the screws looked like allen key shape so I got a screwdriver set from Maplins and headed to Kent to do a test build.
Anyone who knows me knows I am not very dexterous, in fact I’m mechanically backwards so I think me building one is a very good test.
Here are the pieces.
Then I fitted them together without screws
Then with the screws (the nylon spacers take ages!)
Lessons learned
- do the spacers and port multipliers first, with SATA and power cables.
- add the drive cage as the sides go on, not at the end
Otherwise it is a doddle, the Backblaze guys and the factory that made them did a great job.
We made a few additions to the design, adding holes for 2×2.5″ disks and option to drop the drive cages to let the disks sit straight on the bottom (John recommended some anti-vibration gel to put on the bottom and potentially replace the rubber bands in the backblaze design) with the hope that we can run without port multipliers. Obviously this would require an obscene amount of cabling in that tiny space at the top, but its worth a try I think. We could then use a fast SATA card well supported in OpenSolaris and get some ZFS goodness on there.
Tom
