Four Drive cage

prusaprinters

So I needed an economical NAS solution, and I came across a SATA backplane on Ali Express while looking for hard drive power cable extensions/splitters. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004023213122.html They don't have any details about it, it's apparently designed for their enclosures, but I wanted to be able to expand and use more than 4 or even 8 drives. These seemed to be quite reasonable, so I purchased a few of them, and waited for them to arrive from China…Now they're in. So I measured and drew up a drive enclosure in CAD.The backplane mounts in with M3x12mm screws and nuts (I have provisions for all 8, but chose to only use 4.)I changed the side hole shape, you can see in the photo that the round holes were a little problematic when printed, so they're teardrop shaped now. The top piece is for 120mm fans, but this backplane has the drives spaced pretty close together, so I don't know how much airflow there will really be. I think that it will be OK for the typical duty cycle that my NAS drives have, where I typically only use one storage set at a time. This was modeled in Fusion 360, based off of my measurements with calipers, not from the design parameters of the backplane PCB. It should handle standard 3.5" SATA hard drives. It doesn't hold the single platter thinner drives firmly, but should still be good enough not to slip.