Flight case

Some time ago, I decided that my PC case had become too full for extra disks (6 disks for a total capacity of 880GB); so I bought a SATA expansion card (which my motherboard didn't have natively, it being kinda old), an ICY BOX rack, and a 250GB SATA disk. All of this culminated in a future-proof concept: if ever I needed extra diskspace, I would only have to buy a new disk and swap it with the operating one.


Life goes on and disks get polluted with all kinds of stuff. Instead of cleaning things up, I just bought another SATA disk, this time one of the 320GB persuasion (I always by the cheapest one - in terms of dosh per GB). My earlier investment payed off, I had no extra disk in my case!
However, I now have one extra disk on my desk. Talking of progress! instead of one extra disk sitting comfy and well-protected within the confines of my case, producing only heat and noise, I have now ended up with one extra naked disk on my desk, waiting to catch all kinds of dust, bumps and electrostatic shocks. At least it doesn't produce heat.


After it lying there for some weeks, I finally decided that a solution should be sought. I needed some kind of housing to store this disk; and not only that, but the housing should be a bit future-proof as well because I can easily imagine myself buying yet another disk if the most recent one gets stuffed.
This decision being taken, the next question was what kind of storage? The idea was to have something in which I could not only store disks, but also carry them around in. Then an inspiration particle hit the right spot: why not use a flightcase?
Coincidentally, the city where I live is home to a company selling and renting all kinds of sound and lighting hardware. They also have a cases department, specializing in custom-builds.
Last week I contacted them with a design of my own; the reply came surprisingly quick and was somewhat disappointing: yes they do custom-builds, yes constructing a single case is no problem at all; the price? merely €314.60. Right, yes, well, I hadn't intended to spend that amount of money on a case. At that moment, I decided I could equally well build such a case myself, and that's what I'm going to do during the next few weekends.

Starting such a building adventure commences with budgetting and cost estimates. After carefully looking around here and here and here, I came to the conclusion that, besides parts, I needed some tools as well, which made that the total cost estimate now lies at €310.97. That's a whopping €3.63 cheaper than the custom-made thing! With as extra pros that I end up with a surplus of 35 metres of aluminium profiles, half a litre of paint and some tools for if I ever want to make another case.

To be continued.