Here is what I'm thinking of with respect to internal drives. First off I never thought of the device as having an INTERNAL drive. The idea was to build a networked player that had USB jacks on the back so that if people wanted to use it standalone they could plug in USB drives. People seemed to like the concept of the pluggable drive that could be attached to a PC to transfer collections etc so I never really though of INTERNAL drives.
The original wandboard modules did not have sata so I never took an internal sata drive into account in the design. The recent quad module does support sata, so that sort of changes things, we need to figure out whether the design is going to need to be rethought because of that. The current design is using a Hammond 1455T1601 extruded aluminum enclosure. The board slides into slots in the side walls. With the end panels in place it is completely enclosed no ventilation at all. The wand module and the carrier board are going to take about 2 watts which will work well with the aluminum enclosure which will act as a heat sink for what is inside. This design was never designed to have an additional large heat producing device inside. The idea was that if you wanted to use a large drive that uses a lot of power that you plug it into the the USB port and use the power supply and heat removal mechanism that came with the drive. Having to support power hungry drives and get rid of their heat would compromise the design in several ways by adding increased electrical noise in the box, possible fans that not only add electrical but also acoustic noise. I'm trying to produce the best sounding network music player I can with for low cost, low power and small size. Internal drives tend to conflict with that. With the advent of the quad module with a working SATA port I have been persuaded to add a SATA connector and a power connector that can be somehow cabled to a drive. Using this for an internal drive with the existing case is going to be problematic, there is very little room left in the box. Maybe a tiny SSD might fit, but that is about it. There IS a version of the enclosure that is 2.3 inches longer (1455T2201) that would just have enough room to fit a 2.5" drive. It should be possible to build some sort of bracket that mounts to the front panel which supports a standard 2.5" drive. I have not looked into the thermal aspects of this to see if the extra heat from the drive is going to be an issue or if the temperature in the box is going to be all right for a mechanical drive. SSDs should probably be all right. Anything past this is going to need a completely different enclosure and power supply design. The board itself may be sufficient, but the enclosure and power system are going to have to be different. This is part of what I want the beta period for: people to use the the thing and find out of there is large demand for a different product. A file server version that can hold multi-terabyte libraries is going to have to be a different solution than the black box music player. I can provide the SATA connector on the board so others can explore additional case and power options, mechanical design is not my forte. Just be prepared that by the time you put 5 terabytes of storage in the same box with the analog electronics, said electronics may not sound as good. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98544 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list unix@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
