Heya everyone, I recently obtained a SCSI 7-8 bay CDROM server device? It is a large case housing 7 SCSI CDROM drives (room for 8) but the backplane has been removed. If I were to remove all of the CDROM drives I would basically be left with an empty tower with 8 drive bays and a PSU / fan with 7 x 4 pin power connectors for CDROMs / HDDs, two case fans and no circuitry. What I would like to do is replace all of the CDROM devices with 8 x large capacity SATA HDDs using mobile racks (with a 4pin -> SATA power adapter). I would then use a SATA -> USB converter on each of the devices and connect them all to an 8 port USB hub which would then connect externally to a PC. The newly created tower would not have multiple devices accessing it, nor will multiple files be written to or read from it at the same time. Its basic purpose would be to back-up all my DVDs and music files. It will then be accessed by a PC to play any of the multimedia at any given time. Is there any reason why this would not work? I hope I have phrased the question properly and my terminology is correct. Please let me know if what I am trying to achieve is obscure.

The only problem that I might be concerned with is the power supply. Optical drives and hard drives draw approximately the same amount of current (10-20 watts). But they are (of course) built different, and I'm wondering if all the hard drive motors starting up at the same time might draw too much juice. I suspect that they draw more juice starting up than an optical drive motor. I'm not sure if there's any way of knowing for sure until you try it.

Cheers aegis, I'm going to give it a blast. I did overlook any start-up power consumtion issue that might occur, I hope the power supply can handle it (to be honest I'm not even sure it works). It also isn't intended to be running 24/7, only intermittently, so I guess there's another consideration of possible PSU breakdown in the future. Thanks for the input, it's much appreciated.

Good luck btk1w1, it looks like a worthwhile project. If it doesn't work out, maybe you could use a cheap PC power supply.