I had been researching ways to make a smaller OMV based NAS to replace the one that I already had at my brothers house for hosting my backups, so when that original solution died late December I quickly put my plan into action. Because of the limits of my upload speeds, and his download speeds, I didn't need something that moves super fast, so I ended up going with a Rpi, though I purposely put my solution together so that I can upgrade to another, more powerful SBC in the the future if need be. It took me probably 8+ hours to put this guy together, but I am hoping that it will last me long into the future, with only occasionally replacing the SBC. Here is a list of parts that I used, not including data drives.
The hardrive enclosure
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USB A 3.0 right angle extension cable.
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USB B 3.0 right angle extension cable
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RJ45 jacks
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Right angle micro USB cable
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SATA power extension cable
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Epoxy Putty
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So here is what the final project looks like all buttoned up. Besides looking at the back, you can barely tell that I changed anything from the outside.
Here is a peak at the modifications that I had to make on the inside. I glued the USB extender, SATA extender and a short ethernet cable I made all onto a small piece of wood the size of a hardrive so that I can place the SBC onto the board, sort my cables out and hold them together with tape. Then just insert the hole thing into the case to connect it to everything that I need it to connect with. I purposely left several of the cables on this board long so that I could easily upgrade to a different SBC in the future.
For anyone concerned about the pi not getting enough power with this setup through the SATA power, here is my experience with that. When I initially put this together, I was using a 2.5 USB hardrive as one of my storage disks since I had it lying around when I put my first backup server together. This was powered 100% through it's USB connection to the pi with no problems. As a stress test to the build as a whole, and because I didn't want to stick with the 2.5 USB hardrive in there long term, I rsync'ed the 900 GB of data from the 2.5 drive, to it's current home on a standard 3.5 drive all in one shot. So over a 14 hour period of all the power and heat stress that I could throw at this thing, it didn't have a single problem. Since all my hardrives are now powered through the enclosure, I don't anticipate any long term problems with the pi not getting enough power.
Below is a link to the full size photo's just in case anyone wants to inspect them in detail.
https://photos.google.com/shar…HaG13bjBjdERhY2RQQm9URTl3