Achievement Complete: New Custom 2.5″ SATA Drive Caddy

Five versions printed for testing and fitting, a failed orange PETG print, and a final orange PETG print

Final OpenSCAD render, oriented for printing

I couldn’t be happier with how this model and print turned out.

Fifth variation on the 2.5″ SATA hard drive caddy for the Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M70q case

The part pops into place snugly, even though it doesn’t include any snap-fit parts. The two tabs on the right fit over and around two bent metal tabs coming off of the frame, the beveled section on the left sits on a metal bar, with a hole for a bolt head which holds that metal frame in place. The design doesn’t include all the fancy fiddly bits that go in and around that metal bar, but it doesn’t wiggle with medium pressure. It’s easy enough to drop into place and remove without too much trouble.

In a perfect world, I would have printed it in a more appropriate color befitting an arc reactor, like glow in the dark, white, light blue, or some combination. However, while I have a medium sized collection of PLA in various colors, I’m fine with just using this one roll of PETG in it’s bright orange for those use cases requiring something that requires more flexibility or heat resistance than PLA.

I’m super happy to have this PC housing a drive that will likely last me a very long time. Our old external backup drive holds 2TB, is quite slow, requires a USB mini to USB A cable, and a huge wall wart power adapter. Now I can keep our files easily accessible inside this PC without no fussing with cables/adapters, taking up a USB port, and not requiring the additional space that’s literally larger than this entire PC.

In other news on this “Project Jarvis”… I haven’t been making much progress lately. I’m not able to run any reasonably capable local LLM’s at any exciting speeds, but it’s still at least possible at a 1-2 token per second rate. I think once it’s set up I’ll probably want to switch it to a “dumber” smart assistant kind of system where it helps me answer basic verbal queries about the weather, date, schedules/cron jobs, and any sensors I might create.

Project Jarvis

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