Custom storage server upgrade

.anon · November 2, 2025

Hey guys. Yesterday I did a upgrade to my storage server and wanted to share with you all. Well it was rather an overhaul completely.

I use it mostly as cold backup, so there is a mix and mash of a bunch of different drives, but that does not quite matter.

TLDR:

In my country rackmount cases are not easy to find. Or rather, not at all. I finally managed to find a rackmountable mining case, some 6 years ago. I modeled some brackets for it, and sent it to be CNC-d from plastic. This was quite brittle, but didn't have the time to bather with it. Had to cut out the backside of the case in order to fit my 40g sfp+ card, and a PCIE adapter for more drives.

It was janky as hell. When one of my drives died, I had to take out everything, since there was no easy way to see what drive died and what did not.

I recently got a 3D printer, so I modeled my own brackets and trays, and got to work. Even modeled the backplate. Here is the list of upgrades:

1. Added more storage

2. Modeled the brackets and trays to fit the case perfectly.

3. Modeled tags so that I can add the names of the drives installed for easier problem solving

4. Changed up the fans completely, and added a controller to turn them off or on completely. That way I can swap out a specific fan without shutting down the machine.

5. Modeled the back side so it looks nice and neat now.

Spent almost a full day to disassemble and put everything back together, and believe it or not, worked perfectly on first boot.

Here is the link for the 3D model:

https://makerworld.com/en/models/1931009-3-5-inch-hdd-expandable-caddy-stacker-will-trays

Specs:

Windows server

Ryzen 7 8700G

32gigs of ram

Total of 96.4TB of cold storage. I'm using Stablebit Drivepool for pooling. I know it is not the fastest app, but it gives me options to duplicate folders I need to have duplicated, and leave the rest unduplicated.

256GB OS drive

8TB NVME gen4 drive for daily work

Any recommendations for version 3??

LoweGule · November 2, 2025

Hey really cool project man! Would love to see what projects you do with the server. (Plex? IoT? just NAS?) What are your plans with your beastly server here?

Oh and for suggestions, maybe if you do have the money, build another one with SSDs (づ ◕‿◕ )づ

.anon · November 3, 2025

On 11/2/2025 at 3:47 PM, LoweGule said:

Hey really cool project man! Would love to see what projects you do with the server. (Plex? IoT? just NAS?) What are your plans with your beastly server here?

Oh and for suggestions, maybe if you do have the money, build another one with SSDs (づ ◕‿◕ )づ

Tnx man, yea it has its uses. Recently we have been piling up a lot of data for a specific project I'm working on. So yea, SSDS would be super cool, but not needed for my particular workflow. We need capacity more than we need speed.

In addition to that there is a plex server on it.