Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Mounting a 2.5" SDD in a 3.5" caddy tray for hot-swap servers

When it comes to installing servers there is only one thing I care about: air from the cold aisle flowing over the disks, into the CPU heat sinks and memory, out the back of the server and into the hot aisle.  The standard 3.5" to 2.5" desktop hard drive adapter is not going to work because the SATA port on the disk is not lined up with the backplane. I was disappointed with the quality of converter brackets I found when shopping around.  What I found was expensive, plastic, lacked screws, and blocked air from coming into the server chassis.  So I improvised.  Here is a caddy for a Dell PowerEdge 2950 and a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB:

 Tape, underused tool in IT:
Duct tape also works.
I was happy with the firmness of the tape and the SATA ports line up with the backplane beautifully:

I did a tray pull and insert about a dozen times with no issues.  It has been like this in production for a couple months now.  With the lack of adapter maximum air flow is achieved.  Totally non-conformist, but sometimes IT is like that.