HTPC/NAS/PC mini-ITX box - First Look - New Pics Added!

[pcdlab]

Hi Everyone!

The mini-ITX HTPC/NAS/PC prototype is in hand and turned out great with only a few small revisions needed! Below is the first long anticipated look at our new line of mITX enclosures and systems!


Images

***You can view the full size image by using the right mouse click "view..." or "save..." functions in your browser.***


-It's alive!



-We may play with the aesthetic somewhat and turret press vent holes into the front and top rather than laser cut the slots shown. The design is scalable and simple to modify so we can pretty much create any look for OEM customers!



-Two 60mm fans are supported for excellent airflow and redundancy. Note the ability to use a standard I/O panel unlike other mITX cases which have proprietary cutouts that only work with certain motherboards!



-Two thumbscrews hold the cover firmly into place for easy access. Cable management will obviously be improved as we order more suitable cable lengths for the units. You've seen how tidy our Qmicra systems are so you know we're fanatical about this and it actually demonstrates that there's enough room to use whatever desktop parts one might have laying around.



-A dual 2.5" HDD hot swap bay and 3.5" WD VelociRaptor desktop drive are shown installed. The HDD cage is easily removed via the four philips head screws in the face shown in the front view pics. Although 60x60x15mm fans are shown installed, you can fit 25mm thick ones. (We plan on making the case 1/4" deeper to reduce the chance of non-SFF cables causing interference issues.) Finally, note that a stock Intel socket 775 heatsink/fan is being used! No more heat issues with low profile heatsinks and their noisy fans!



-As with Qmicra, we can powder coat and silk screen our cases in virtually any color the customer wants! This also shows the case without the side L-brackets and with the standard non-illuminated switch installed.


-Updated internal pic with improved cable management. Everything that could be sleeved w/o cutting the cables was done. Shorter black cables (like for the SATA cables) would most likely be procured for system orders built in quantity.

Case Specs

-mITX Mainboard - Socket 775 Supported!
-90-120W Pico PSU
-(2) 3.5" Bays Support Desktop HDD's and Bay Devices such as Hot Swap Bays, I/O Panels, LCD displays, and more!
-Standard Mainboard I/O Panel Supported!
-Stock Intel CPU Heatsink/Fan Supported!
-2x60mm Fans - Built in Redundancy and Efficiency!
-0.040" Powder Coated Aluminum - It's very light and strong!
-Steel Threaded Pems to Resist Stripping
-All Parts Removable w/ Minimum of Fasteners
-Removable Mounting Brackets to Attach Case to any Load Bearing Surface
-Dimensions: 8.5"[216]L x 12.5"[318]W x 2.75"[70]H - It has a very small footprint!
-Weight: Approx. 6 lbs. Loaded with Hardware -  It's very strong yet light!
-Made in the USA at market competitive pricing!


System Specs

Here are a few system variants envisioned...

-Home: Low power Intel Atom 330 w/ (2) 3.5" desktop HDD's for up to 4TB of storage!

-Media: Zotac Atom N330 w/ (3) SATA ports for several combinations of desktop and laptop hard drives as well as I/O panel and displays possible.

-Enterprise: Intel DQ45EK mITX mainboard w/ Core 2 Quad CPU. Storage can be (2) 3.5" desktop drives, (4) hot swappable 2.5" drives or a combination of the two.

-Industrial: High MTBF iBase MI900/935 mainboard w/ C2D CPU. Storage can be two solid state disks in RAID-1 for reliability and reduced down time in environments that are hostile to computing equipment


Notes

-An enterprise version is currently being tested using FreeNAS and the CPU/HDD's are running in the low 30's at idle with a room temp. of 72F so the cooling is even better than expected! As with Qmicra, providing adequate ventilation and positioning the hardware in the front to back airflow stream provides superior cooling! More info to come soon!

Best Regards,
Dave-pcdlab

[Lipton]

Hi,

I think a very good idea would be to create a case with :
* Micro ATX or mini ITX support
* Support of 6,8 or 10 3.5" hard drives , as there are cheaper and offer more space that 2.5"

The hard drives could be put into racks (2 for example) like this one :

http://www.raidsonic.de/en/pages/products/backplanes.php?we_objectID=5595

I have 4To NAS (5*750Go - RAIDZ + 2x500Go - ZFS), and I'm obliged to use a tower.
I have a friend that has the same issue.

Hope this help

Lipton

[pcdlab]

Hi Lipton,

Thanks for the feedback. As with Qmicra, this mini-box is a versatile platform to create solutions for DIY'ers and the custom system work that we do. With the proprietary NAS boxes, you can only slam HDD's in and that's it. With our stuff, you can choose the mobo, CPU, PSU, etc. and build anything ranging from a very low power Atom system to a high speed Intel quad-core machine. I decided to give it (2) 3-1/2" bays because hard drives are still growing in size and it won't be long before you can stuff 6TB+ (with the option of RAID 0/1) into the box which is often plenty for small businesses and home/car media streaming applications. Also, most mainstream mini-ITX mainboards only support 2-4 SATA ports anyway which is why it holds up to 2 desktop drives or 4 laptop drives. So it fits in nicely between the current mini-ITX boxes on the market which lack this power and the pricey higher end proprietary equipment that you described.

Regards,
Dave

[Steeeeve]

Very nice for the business folks.  I assume it is for rack mounting...any chance of an easy open lid on it?

[pcdlab]

It's nice for home and business and can be mounted to any load bearing surface whether it be a rack shelf, table, wall, etc. It's also less costly, more versatile and can definitely hold more processing power than proprietary NAS boxes. It's really only an NAS in name as it can be used as a mini system for lots of applications.

For instance, optical drives aren't needed as much as people are downloading their software/media more often these days, people are just using flash drives instead of burning discs (I honestly think you're better off just getting one USB optical drive for all your machines) and onboard graphics are fine for high-def video as well as some light gaming. Finally, mini-ITX mobos pretty much support the latest and greatest tech and I can't wait to get some more of these to start experiment with cluster computing!

Anyway, the cover is held firmly in place by miniature keyhole fasteners and easily removed via two thumbscrews in the back. It took a long time to come up with an elegant design solution as there is very little room to work with but I finally cracked it and it turned out better than I had hoped!

[Lipton]

In fact I was speaking about a case with enought space to put 1-2 racks (ex : the one I proposed in the link).

I did not speak about propriatary NAS. The owner will be in charge of the the MB, memory, HD's, installation of the soft - solaris 10 as I have at home or freenas...

For the number of HD, I have a PCI 8 sata ports RAID card.

Anyway, the NAS you propose is very interesting for small business . But I still need to search for a box that will let me to put lot of 3.5" HD into a SFF

[pcdlab]

Understood. You can technically put up to 7x3.5" desktop drives in our Qmicra micro-ATX case. 4 fit standard on the internal brackets and you can load more in the 3x5.25" bays.

[squakk]

So does the final mini-itx case have all the holes shown in the 4th pic for the top? or just the 2 thumbscrews from behind? 

[pcdlab]

It might be hard to tell from the pic but those are keyhole fasteners in the top of the cover and it's held into place with the two thumb screws in the back.

[squakk]

Right.  They are still holes that pass through the cover where you can see the other side in the picture.  In the complete case those holes seem to disappear completely.  Just wondering how they disappeared or is that just an example of an option that you can do?

[pcdlab]

Those are keyhole fasteners in the cover. They're unpainted on the inside of the cover so they look like holes in the pic but they're actually round bare aluminum.

[squakk]

Interesting, guess it is just an illusion created by the back drop being close to the same color.  Looks good.

[hatbrox]

My view is that this product will not work.
There are already a lot of 1 or 2 disk enclosure that work as a NAS and media center (I personnally like the Lacie one)
cost wise, I doubt this product can compete.

talking on a couple of forums and with friends, I realize that the main problem we have is HD capacity and and little space in our home.

for me any NAS box must have 8 disks. And that's a minimum. I've started to RIP my blu-ray and DVD it takes a lot of space. But hte worse is when the videos from my HD video camera, it takes 60G per hour of recording. And I refuse to compress them as I may want to create new videos in the future for different reasons so I always keep the source file uncompressed. I've got already 3 Tb of data (without the backup), the second baby is coming, I just started buying blu rays.
blu ray rips are not backup up, pictures, kids video are backed up 2 times on separate disks.

In my opinion the perfect compromise between size and disk bays is the QNAPTS859 Pro
a complete system for:
185.2 (H) x 298.2 (W) x 235.4 (D) mm
7.29 (H) x 11.74 (W) x 9.27 (D) inch

unfortunately you're stuck with QNAP linux distro. I would have preferred WHS.
and the other problem is that they ask for a huge amount of money for a case with an Atom CPU!

so there is a market here for this type of size and features that let consumers a certain degree of flexibility in the choice of components.

[pcdlab]

Hatbrox... while I understand your point about what you're specifically looking for in an NAS box... I think you misunderstand the purpose of this one. To address your points...

-There are no mini-ITX boxes with (2) external 3.5" bays in this price range that I know of. (Certainly not of the same quality and ruggedness!) I also don't know of any mini-ITX boxes this size that have the space, airflow, power or heatsink support to load a Quad-Core CPU.

-The products you mentioned are exorbitantly priced proprietary solutions. For instance, the QNAPTS859 Pro is $1500 (does it even come fully loaded with drives?) and it can only be used as an NAS box. Our box can be used for dozens of system applications (home/business PC, media/network storage, Linux-MCE MD/core, industrial controls, etc.) and it's 1/3 the price for us or a DIY'er to build one using the parts that they like.

-In regard to storage, you can install 2x3.5" drives or 4x2.5" drives for what is currently 4TB of storage (this is always going up) in RAID 0/1/5 which many people will find very useful. Going back to the QNAPTS859, if you're looking for a box that holds 8+ drives, then it would be much more cost effective to go with any of a dozen micro-ATX or rack mount cases that you can load your own hardware in which will greatly outperform the QNAP stuff.

-Our enclosure is designed to be scalable so it can be easily modified to accommodate other hardware specs for our OEM customers. By all means... call Lacie and see if they'll build you a high performance custom system using their plastic box at the same relative retail pricing as we can do.

As you wrote out your thoughts... it appears that you began to wrap your mind around the product as you started with... "this product will not work!" and ended with "so there is a market here for this type of size and features that let consumers a certain degree of flexibility in the choice of components"... so I suggest taking another look at the first page in this thread to see what the concept is really about.

[toddn]

i posted some of this with the review on losias.net...but later thought i'd be better handled here...

Very, very nice box!

my only design comment is, how about providing support for mini-itx expansion cards (pcie 1x, etc.)? it would either add some to the height or necessitate readjusting the rear fans to provide an area for the pcie mounting bracket.

i have a dg45fc and am looking to export the sata ports to multilane esata for external hdd storage. i cant find any information as to whether ich10 supports esata multilane so i’m looking to use an adapter to provide this.  However, i’m already going to have to mod the case to support my ir-receiver (using the intel cir header) so i could just also mod the case for a multilane adapter plate.

with regard to generic mini-itx/htpc cases, there is just too much to say and too many case permutations…however, i have literally spent the last week looking through hundreds of cases.  99.99% of the boxes out there just dont appeal to me. 

- i want a nice, clean, minimalist design, aluminum case, that could be used in configured in various ways.
- i dont care for all the built-in i/o on the front (hidden or not).
- i've already come to the conclusion that i want to externalize the dvd/blu-ray/what's coming in the future optical drive. so slot or tray-in cases are out for me.
- I want a small footprint and thus don’t need a lot of space for internal hdd since I’m exporting hdd’s to an external esata enclosure.  Btw..An external enclosure with the look of the hive mini-itx and having 4-bays for 3.5” hot-swappable sata drives and a multilane esata interface would be really nice…

i was strongly considering either the hFX mini server or a pslie case…however, when I stumbled upon the hive mini-itx today, it changed my mind. I love the design and how you handled the 3.5” front access drive bays to provide options.

I will probably buy one today!
 
I hope you have much success!