Here’s the 2.5″ drive bay in the initial iteration of the threaded-box Luggable PC design. It is a simple, basic place to hold one laptop-sized drive, but not a very efficient use of space.

The most obvious thing to do is to vertically stack another drives adjacent to the existing drive. Easy to do in CAD, but has problems in the real world.

Problem 1: How do you access the fasteners? The laptop storage market have mostly settled around two basic fastener schemes: four screws on the bottom of the drive, or four screws along the sides. If we use the side fasteners, they would not be accessible for drive replacement without taking the whole case apart. The bottom fasteners would be accessible, except that bracket would be impossible to print on a FDM 3D printer.

Problem 2: How do you connect the wires? While at first glance there is enough space to physically accommodate the drive and its plugs, it fails to take into account the wires. The wires for the existing drive barely clear the edge in the picture. Stacking another drive into that space (even if moving it another cm or two to the right) would demand wires make relatively sharp right-angle turns. This would place strain on the connectors including the fragile unsupported SATA connectors on the drive itself.

After some experimentation with the available space, keeping in mind the requirements above, I decided to angle the two stacked drives:

Now the Luggable PC has two independent drives: One for Windows 10, and another for Ubuntu Linux 16.10.

This design solves the fastener issue: in this arrangement, it is possible to 3D print the drive bay so both drives are held in place by the shape without use of any screws on the sides or on the bottom. Both drives are held in place by a single 3D printed clamp that is secured with just two screws. The downside is that the design only works when both drives are present. It is unable to hold a single drive in place.

This also solves the initial wiring issue: By angling both drives, the wires do not have to make sharp turns and would not place unreasonable strain on the connectors. However, this comes at a cost of usable interior volume. By angling the connectors, and avoiding sharp turns, the cables consumed more precious interior volume than the previous design.

Going back to the idea of drives stacked in the available volume, we revisit the problem of forcing wires to make sharp turns. The turns can be relaxed if we can find more room for the wires without angling it into precious interior volume. The solution turned out to be… turning the drives instead! By rotating 90 degrees a drive can be positioned to make room for the cables’ turns. It also allows two drives to exist side-by-side, allowing the bay to work with a single drive or dual drives.

This design was incorporated into the following iteration of the chassis, built using aluminum extrusions instead of threaded rods as the metal structure.