cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/66988984
What I have
I have an old Acer Aspire A515-51G and I also have a desire to have a home server. In combination this creates a need for the laptop to carry more HDDs than it can from factory. Usually it can take one M.2 SSD and one 2.5" SATA drive.
What I want
I want to make the laptop able to run at least 4 HDDs in RAID 5 for storage and have one SSD as boot drive.
What I did
The buying phase
- 4 HDDs
- M.2 to SATA adapter
- 12V/5V SATA power converter
- 12V 10A power supply
The designing phase
I needed space to hold the HDDs, so I designed a 3D printed a cage to attach to the bottom of my laptop. Two 80mm fans can be attach to it. You can see it on printables. Also I remixed a tray (here is the original) so the HDDs can slide in and out of the cage.
.
The assembly phase
A cutout at the bottom of the laptop was needed to give access to the SATA ports of the adapter.
I put a 2.5" SSD into the already present place for it in the laptop.
Then the cage was attached to the laptop, the HDDs were put in their trays, the trays inside the cage and the cables attached to the adapter and HDDs.
Did you read the whole post? I thought I made clear what I did.
Yes and I have almost zero knowledge of hardware. So it might be something obvious but initial buying phase photo suggests you bought a card with 6 sata ports and connected them to the motherboard. Can you just connect sata boards to the mother board just like that without any extra work?
I could, yes. The laptop has an M.2 slot that is intented to be used for M.2 SSDs, maybe you know them, they’ve gotten very popular. Almost any mordern motherboard has space for them.
But instead of putting an M.2 SSD in that slot, I bought this adapter with SATA ports. And this adapter fits exactly in the same spot as the SSD could have. Then the SATA ports of the adapter can just be used as regular SATA ports as on any motherboard.
nice, thanks