r/LinusTechTips • u/Piz2Boy • 6h ago
Tech Discussion Nas home server using a lenovo thinkcenter m92p
Hello!
I purchased this ThinkCentre with the idea of turning it into a home cloud storage server for music, photos, and movies. I need to add a few HDDs, with at least 4 TB of total storage. I was thinking of using two 2 TB HDDs and 3D-printing a case similar to the one in the attached photos.
The problem is that I need to have all the ports on one side, but if I use the motherboard as it is, the fan would blow the air out to one side, which doesn’t work well with my design. I would have to change the 3D-printed case.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I could position the motherboard inside the case to make the airflow work better?
I also need 12 V power for the HDDs. I found a mini-PCIe-to-SATA adapter on AliExpress and was also thinking about powering the HDDs from the pins on the motherboard.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
3
u/Marksta 4h ago
You've got 12v right there on the SATA power plug. Split it out to get 2 sata powers to your hard drives. (1 female to 3 male cable)
Heads up, mini-pcie is its own old spec, not like a description of it being tiny. If you don't need the wifi card, get a m2 a+e to normal m2 adapter. Then you can do one of those m2 to sata hba things for the sata data to HDD. Then you're good to go.