Want:
- At least the exterior is all metal.
- Minimum spacing between the drives stored within.
- The unit can be stacked, nestled side-by-side.
- I can pick the unit up by its hand holes or foldable handles.
Do not want:
- Plastic shells/exteriors have a tendency to crack and don’t stand up well to frequent handling. The best laptops I’ve had have metal exteriors; the plastic ones all eventually cracked or had parts that broke off.
What I plan to do with such a product:
- Put it in the trunk of a car or moving truck.
- Toss it in carry-on luggage.
- Forget about it in a closet that’s way too small for rent that’s way too high.
The aluminum isn’t very important; it just so happened that all the metal boxes for drives in the wider market were predominantly aluminum cases. Metal in general is fine, for the same reasons that I’d get a ToughArmor MB998IP-B over an ExpressCage MB038SP-B.
I’ve looked at some in-person, and the customizable foam interiors are cut into grids of rectangular blocks which can be ripped out. I don’t really like them since the drives have to be kept from grinding against each other in the box, but the thickness of the foam blocks add a lot of slack space to the interior which could have been used to hold more drives instead.
Perfect… because two similar concepts already exist, or a lot of what’s already manufactured could be repurposed for simpler needs.
I’ve got two ideas which achieve the same thing but taken in opposite directions.
One is a standalone product purpose-built for moving and stacking. CP092-1 and CP092-2 are the closest concept products I’m looking for. They each have a handle I can use for carrying, which can be folded so that the unit can be laid on a flat surface or stacked on top of another without tipping over. I want that, but without the exterior (e.g., MCIO) connectors, PCB, and fans, leaving a flat metal surface in their place. I wouldn’t be inserting the unit into a computer chassis anyway. The square cut-out on the top would also be gone.
The other idea is to create a metal chassis, which would be a shell for mounting existing products like the ToughArmor MB998IP-B or ExpressCage MB038SP-B—essentially a computer chassis without support for mounting a motherboard, PSU, nor fans. Those 5.25 inch enclosures could even have variants released without the fans and electronics. (The internal connectors would be replaced with dummy plugs.) This would make the product customizable, without the added cost of the electronics for the consumer, while tapping into resources already used to manufacture existing product lines.