What I have
I have an old Acer Aspire A515-51G and I also have a desire to have a home server. In combination this creates a need for the laptop to carry more HDDs than it can from factory. Usually it can take one M.2 SSD and one 2.5" SATA drive.
What I want
I want to make the laptop able to run at least 4 HDDs in RAID 5 for storage and have one SSD as boot drive.
What I did
The buying phase
- 4 HDDs
- M.2 to SATA adapter
- 12V/5V SATA power converter
- 12V 10A power supply
The designing phase
I needed space to hold the HDDs, so I designed a 3D printed a cage to attach to the bottom of my laptop. Two 80mm fans can be attach to it. You can see it on printables. Also I remixed a tray (here is the original) so the HDDs can slide in and out of the cage.
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The assembly phase
A cutout at the bottom of the laptop was needed to give access to the SATA ports of the adapter.
I put a 2.5" SSD into the already present place for it in the laptop.
Then the cage was attached to the laptop, the HDDs were put in their trays, the trays inside the cage and the cables attached to the adapter and HDDs.
very cool. wanted to do ~~exactly that~~ something similar with a Lenovo Ideapad I found. except, I don't want to buy the adapter board, I just wanna utilise the existing two SATA ports in the laptop; one HDD, one DVD. haven't figured a zerospend way to do that, as the SATA ports on the MB are female, as are the cables.
second, don't wanna use an external PSU, there's gotta be a way to get 12 V off the board somehow or use a step-down module from, say, backlight?
does acer have a power-on on AC setting in the setup or do you have to power it on manually?
I power the laptop with its external PSU and removed the battery. Not sure that answers your question.
when you connect the PSU, does the laptop power on or do you have to press the power button? mine doesn't power on on its own, with or without battery.
I have to press the power button.
If you remove the battery (to avoid swelling), you'll have a vacant port. But connecting that in any way that won't fry your drives is another question I haven't solved...