Affordable Custom 2.5 inch SATA SSD/HDD 4 Bay Direct Attached Drive Enclosure

So it all started with me having a lot of data that I have collected over time which I never wanna to throw away, and even worse, I actually want to carry most of them always with me, even when I am travelling. I do have my own local storage server that I built, but, it’s a little bit too big and not exactly travel friendly. I often have all my data in direct attached storages, and then have it sync to my NAS on a regular cadence. So far I have been using a few 2.5 inch hard drives in separate enclosures, but, connecting them all togehter is often a pain which I described in a recent video. I will leave the link in the description if you are interested. So I was trying to get a single enclosure which can fit about 4 drives, especially only for 2.5 inch drives, as it should keep the size manageable for travel.

However, when I started my research, I found most of them to be for both 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives becuase of which the sizes were pretty big for my use. There are some availabe which are small but the design is open and I wanted a closed enclosure. There is one thunderbolt option available, the OWC ThunderBay Mini, but it’s pretty expensive. It costs about $350 dollars with the softraid option, and about $230 just for the eclosure. Also I am typically not a fan of Thunderbolt devices as it limits my options to connect. My ideal solution was an enclosure very similar to the OWC one, but with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 GBPS interface and preferably a little cheaper. Now for those who are thinking about the speed limit of 10 Gbps, it’s typcially okay for me as I don’t normally use more than 2 drives at the same time and considering SATA 3’s limit of 500mbps, it should be fine.

That is when I started thinking about making my own enclosure. I found these 4 bay SATA 2.5 inch drive enclosures online which costs about $45 dollars. These have an integrated SATA backplane and an all in one SATA power input for the drives which is neat. Once the drive cage was settled, next thing I needed to figure out was what to do with the data connection. I chose to use an NVME Enclosure here which you can find as little as $20 dollars these days, and this converts an NVME interface to an USB or Thunderbolt connection. It’s pretty easy to expand the NVME M.2 slot to SATA connections, using a SATA adapter card like this which costs about $30 dollars. For the sata connections to the cage, I am using these unique SATA 90 cables that has a reverse angle to make my life a bit easier for a cleaner fit.

For power, initially I thought about using a direct DC to SATA or Molex adapter, but after doing some research, I found them to be not so reliable. The SATA power protocol supports both 5v and 12v inputs, and depending on the input power controller on the drives, it can pull differnt voltages which the direct volatage adapters may not be able to put out, leading up to an unstable drive or even failures. This is where a proper PSU comes into play, that can send out a pure SATA power signal following all the protocols. I am using a Pico PSU here which is pretty compact and you can find them for as low as about $20 dollars. These take in a DC input, somewhere in the range of 12v to 19v depending on which one you get. These Pico PSUs are ATX compatible, so they need a jumper on the motherboard header to work. You can use any cheap jumper that often comes with normal PSUs, I picked up this fancy one for about $10 which has a switch as well. Now we have a neat litte PSU setup ready to go which we can use for our SATA power input to the drives. Please keep in mind that the 4 drives will need about 15 Watts of power so you would want to match that in our Pico PSU and the corresponding DC adapter you use.

Once all of this is sorted out, we need to just built it now. First, I took out the howswap plates from the cage, attached the drives to the plates and inserted the assemblies back into the cage. For the enclosure, I ended up using an old thunderbolt one here as I had no other use for it, but you can pretty much use any enclosure that can support an M.2 NVME Drive like the USB one I showed before. Intalled the SATA adapter card and set the whole thing on the drive cage using double sided tape. I Connected the SATA cables and cleaned it up a little bit for some easy cable management. At this point, it felt like a good idea to see if this is all working, which I did and all the drives showed up which was a great sign. I re-tested the exact voltage from the adapter I was using to make double sure it’s at 12V as my Pico PSU needed, and then attached the PSU onto the cage body, keeping in mind how the cables will be routed. Please note that as the components of the PSU can get hot, so I used a thermal pad to help dissipate the heat to the cage. The cage is made out of aluminum and should be able to handle it pretty well. I did some more cable management and we were ready to move to the next phase.

After the connections sorted out, all there was left to do was to build a case for this, well I should say extend the drive eclosure to be more accurate. The idea was to build a metal extension bracket and then cover up the rest with plastics. I took some measurements, drew out the shapes for reference and cut a 1mm aluminum plate to fit as an outer layer on top of the enclosure. These typically are designed to go into a PC case in the 5inch slots, so they already have holes in there for connection which I use to connect the metal bracket.

For the remainder of the case, I added an ABS plastic peice in the front, mostly using glue. For the back side, I took another ABS plastic sheet, made some holes for the USB input, the power barrel jack and the jumper switch and connected it to cover the rest of the case. I used some black corner guards to get rid of the sharp aluminum egdes and also to add some really nice aesthetics to the final product.

Overall, the whoe enclosure feels pretty rugged for what it is, and it prefectly rigid for carrying in a carry on bag for my travels.

If you are planing to build something similar, expect to spend about $45 for the sata enclosure, $20 for the nvme enclosure, $35 for the sata to nvme drive, $25 for Pico PSU, $10 for the adapter and $10 for other miscellaneous stuff which brings the total price to less than $150, which is much lower than even the most affordable options out there. Also, if you don’t mind waiting for delivery, you can source all of these from Aliexpress for much less. The closest match, and kind of the only similar available option is this SABRENT Tower Enclosure which is not bad, but it comes with Gen 1 5gbps speed which is a littele less for 4 drives.

The best part is that you can pretty much recreate the same build for more than 4 drives, use more nvme enclosures if you think you need more than one connection etc. and the possibility is endless. Even with 4 drives, you can setup an all SSD DAS with up to 32TB of fast SSD local storage which is an amazing amount of storage to have, and to be travelling with!

I tested out the enclosure with various machines and I am currently using it for my main rig and is working great.

If you have any suggestions for improvements or have other ideas for similar products, do let me know in the comments and I will try to work on it!