One drawback of the case that I bought for Project Gibson is the fact that 3 of the drive bays are for 5.25″ drives. It’s not a major problem, but it does require some adapters to fit my 3.25″ hard drives. I could purchase these off the shelf, at about $10 each, but I could also print a few of them at a fraction of the cost in PLA filament (not to mention not having to either wait on an Amazon delivery or braving another trip to Micro Center)! I grabbed a model from Thingiverse that fit the bill, and an hour or so in printing later, I have 3 of these bad boys ready to go.
I didn’t need a lot of fine detail with this print. After all, it’s going inside a closed box that’s going behind the sofa, so it’s not going to be seen, like, ever. I sliced these with the coarsest default settings in Cura: 0.6mm layer height and 20% infill. No supports are needed, but a small brim helps with adhesion–especially with the larger layer height and less infill. Once printed, the drive can be mounted with standard screws or simply slipped into the adapter (the tension from the SATA cables is more than enough to hold the drive in place), and we’re ready to install the FreeNAS OS!