nano-itx in an external hdd enclosure?

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Factorxfiles

Limp Gawd
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May 20, 2006
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So the whole idea of super-tiny pc's has always appealed to me. I've been thinking of making a little via nano-itx machine recently, and I just have to wonder....would it fit inside an external HDD enclosure? I did a rough estimate that says it would, but would I have enough space for other stuff, like the psu board, a tiny hard drive, and all that? Not worried about cd drives or anything at the moment.
 
Ill step in...

You're talking about a 3.5" enclosur eright? its possible, but not without some modding i dont think. You would need a small PSU, one of those new PicoPSU's would work well, or a small 40-60w itx psu. Second youde need to use compactflash as a harddrive, i dont think youde have room for even a 2.5" HDD, though it MIGHT be possible.
 
How about battery powered? Those pico-psu's are dc-dc, so....they could work off a battery? How hard would it be to get a pretty lightweight battery pack of some sort working with them? I hit google but I didn't come up with much. It's just a thought. I mean if I've got a computer that small, why not try to go mobile, ya know? But yeah compact flash would be fine for storage. Less power, less chance of death.

Now all i've gotta do is get some money. :D
 
Someone ran a max mini off a battery pack, im sure you can do it too.
 
CF would probably give you more chance for death, so I would not store anything critical on it. It's not the most reliable media.

Battery sounds like a good idea. There must be some sort of tiny laptop battery that would fit those dimensions and you could jury rig a way to charge it with a docking station. That would be cool to have a PC the size of an iPod.

The whole problem is you are still going to have to lug a monitor and all of your peripherals around with you so the utility of going ultra small is going to be limited. Plus there is the stealability factor you may have to think about...
 
Really, CF is unreliable? I would've thought it'd be more reliable, with no moving parts.

About the laptop battery thing. I need some resource for info on them. I've never owned a laptop, much less read up on the inner workings of them. How does the battery hook up to the rest of the system? Does it hook onto the mobo directly, with separate connectors for cd/hd and all that, or does it actually have standard power connectors like a psu?

Heh, I'm starting to feel like a real noob asking these questions. Can't be helped, google didn't have anything good.
 
Or a 1 inch drive. They are extremely expensive, but they would work much better than a flash drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&description=&srchInDesc=&minPrice=&maxPrice=

The battery in a laptop works sorta like an RC car battery... It just plugs into the controller (motherboard in this analogy) and everything powers off of it. If I recall correctly, laptop batteries usually have 5 or more connectors -- maybe it outputs +-5 +-12 and ground? I have no idea, but I am just guessing. Then again, that is probably wrong since the laptop drives I have used on desktops are all 12v only.

What you want to do sounds awesome, but it will definently take a lot of work and probably cost you quite a bit. http://www.case-mod.com/store/mini-solutions-c-158.html?osCsid=4a4190a61671a49c49ebea09aeaa0c85 has a bunch of extremely small form factor stuff that might help you. Good luck.
 
First link on Yahoo! brought me to the PicoPSU http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.A/id.417/.f How would it work? Well I am not sure, but it does look like most laptop batteries use 5 pins so if you figure out the pinout, you should be able to splice it into that power supply.

Alternatively you could use the PicoPSU and one of those AC/DC transformer cables (laptop power brick). It is still cool, you just have to plug it in.
 
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