What enclosure for raspberry mediacenter?

Sorry, but no.

Ok thx. At this point considering that Plusberry closed the Plerk, my only option is this:

What about the problem of the USB port? Are they accessible once the enclosure is closed? If, how this happen?

All of the connectors (except for composite, if I recall correctly) are accessible. Ethernet, USB and HATs and most add-on boards can be used. There’s space to run cables in / out of the case.

Sam

Thank you.

Hi All,

I write again on this thread because I would like to show you the solution I found for my Media Center:
http://sasadangelo.altervista.org/raspberry-media-center/

The website I linked it’s a personal blog that I only use for my personal notes. It is not designed to be public. I just wrote this post to share my solution with this community.

The article discusses all the possible solutions I evaluated and the reason why I discarded them. This includes also the OSMC PiDrive solution, that I consider today a good solution under some circumstances.

For comments, feedbacks, and opinions you can write here on this thread or directly on the blog.

We are looking at increasing the capacity of the kit in the future.

That’s a good news. Consider this possibility:

  • sells enclosure alone;
  • sells the HDD alone (384 GB, 500 GB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB) the one typical sold as external HDD with cable. I demonstrate that they work perfectly. If you can make an agreement with WD you can save money getting only the HDD without their normal enclosures.

OSMC Target users are hackers or at least people with good technology knowledge. They can assemble them very easily.
For a normal end user, there is Vero.

This is my 2cents on this subject.

The hard disk market is very competitive, and it’s not really our intention to sell any HDDs alone. There are also risks in shipping these alone: damage; loss etc as they are quite fragile. There is also no way that we could compete on price, even with concessions from WD.

Re. selling the enclosure on its own. I agree that many would be happy to put the disk in themselves, but the issue is the type of drive that the enclosure accepts. The enclosure accepts a USB hard disk instead of a SATA one, which I think may catch a few people out.

Perhaps we should make the enclosure more unique, and make adding an HDD an option at the checkout.

If in the sell page it’s clear that the enclosure works only with USB drive I do not see issues. Moreover, if the page contains a link to an HOWTO article that describes in details how to assemble it that would help too. However, I understand the worrying, hope my inputs help you and the team to improve the offering.

I just know we will get a lot of returns.

When we announced it a lot of people said that they wanted to just buy the enclosure so they could put in a SATA drive.

Sam

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Ok, I was too optimistic. However, I remember when I started looking for an enclosure I had the same expectation. Then when you told me it was not for SATA I started to think of use and External HDD since I already had it. The problem was the enclosure. WD sometimes put it out of the stock. When it was available again I bought it (I could risk 11 EUR) and I was lucky enough everything worked perfectly. I was aware of the small space for DVB-T stick and that I needed to open the case each time I needed to connect the gamepads and this is the reason why I bought the USB extensors.

However, hope my article could help someone else that will have my same issues.

This sata to usb adapter looks like it will work as it’s short, unsure if it works with a spinner though https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-5-Inch-Adapter-Optimized-EC-SSHD/dp/B011M8YACM/ref=pd_lpo_147_tr_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QHPEVDBGHKSZ5CMY2WZ9

Comments say a spinner (spinning hard drive) should work

Does it fit the OSMC/WDLabs enclosure? If you look to my article in the image “Hector Raspberry Media Center internals” you can see there is not too much room. It depends on how rigid the cable is. But if it fits the box there is no more excuse to not ship the enclosure alone :slight_smile: .

I think you’re confused, it is a sata to usb adapter so it’s limited to the usb ports speed

Yes I know. You replied few secs while I was removing that part of the comment when I realized that speed was limited by USB.

I have a question: does osmc today set max_current=1 by default?

Another comment I want to add here regarding WD enclosure and OSMC one is that I do not understand why they made USB port inaccessibile unless you open the case. I know it is easy open it but I think that plusberry did a better job from this point of view. I solved using 2 usb extensors with other 10 eur. In My opinion details are important in a product and this is a huge mistake. This is only my final 2cents on subject. Thank you everyone for comments.

Done. See https://osmc.tv/store/product/osmc-pidrive-case/

We will likely do this in the future if we can make it viable.

Sam

Hi Sam,

Good to know, very good news and it is also economic.
I’ll add this option in my article:
http://sasadangelo.altervista.org/raspberry-media-center/

<3 for these cases :smiley:

https://osmc.tv/store/product/osmc-pidrive-case

https://osmc.tv/store/product/bamboo-pidrive-case

try this:
https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Storage-Matching-Enclosure/dp/B076BCBN2B/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1514590145&sr=8-1&keywords=raspberry+pi+hdd+case