HPE Proliant DL165 HDD & SSD brackets

thingiverse

This is yet another thing in a series of highly specific solutions for probably obscure problems that might just inspire or be adapted for similar cases. We've got an old HPE Proliant DL165 server at work that we salvaged from a company that went out of business in the same building. Although it's quite outdated, it still works fine for simple tasks. However, the original trays for mounting hard drives were missing, and all we had was one dummy tray in an unused slot. Initially, we just shoved loose disks into their connectors, but one of them often dropped out of the RAID due to vibrations causing a glitch in the connection. Who would have thought that relying solely on SATA connectors wouldn't provide a secure mount? Instead of trying to find the now almost antique official trays for sale, I used the dummy tray as a model to create minimal brackets that need to be attached to 3.5" disks with ordinary mounting screws. It doesn't look as sleek as full trays but works just as well and offers great airflow. When we had to replace some of the disks, it made more sense to use SSDs, so I created an adapter to fit a 2.5" SSD into the 3.5" tray. The same 4 screws used for mounting a HDD are used to screw the brackets to the adapter. The SSD can be mounted with two 6 mm M3 countersunk screws. There are also two 3 mm holes in the bracket, but normally don't need to be used; the disk can be securely mounted and should be quite level with the left screws only. If you want the SSD to be really sturdily mounted, you could insert some short pegs into its right screw holes or use sawn-off M3 screws (you could cut a slot in them to turn them into tiny screws). Just make sure nothing sticks out more than a millimeter beyond the surface of the bracket, or it will be impossible to slide the tray into the bay. When printing this design, the only thing you really should pay attention to is that the top of the rails is printed as close to 4.10 mm as possible. If it's much thicker, you'll have a hard time getting disks in or out of the slots, and if it's much thinner, they will be sloppy. Since I'm able to level my build plate pretty accurately, all I had to do was set the first layer height to 0.3 mm, and the other 0.2 mm layers did the rest. By the way, avoid using the EVO 860 in this server; it seems to have problems with the SATA controller (at least in Ubuntu 16.04). I switched to an older EVO 840 instead.