Axagon is becoming one "well-known" Chinese brand with their products being slightly over the other budding Chinese products. The quality is reflected in the build sturdiness, overall stability of the hardware, the PCB design and soldering job, the controllers being used and so on. Unfortunately, there are still some little design flaws for the Axagon EE35-XA3 that can be addressed in order to make the product better. In that sense, this guide is more about refinement than redesign, even though some of the flaws seem critical.

• The aluminum enclosure is mostly a relic of Apple that had a tendency to release aluminum-body Apple machine (even though, originally, Macs were very much made out of plastic and not metal) which is a trend that is copied by lots of hardware producers because aluminum is more expensive and hence would indicate a better build quality. The problem with aluminum in the specific case of Axagon EE35-XA3 is that the metal body of the hard-disk does not come in contact with the aluminum case, such that heat will just end up accumulating inside the metal enclosure and literally roast the hard-drive. It is one of those instances where aluminum should not have been used or a contact-safe method should have been devised to connect the body of the Axagon EE35-XA3 to the hard-drive in order to use the case as a heat sink. Even customers noticed that by using the Axagon EE35-XA3, the heat of the drive, in fact, goes up rather than down. Similarly, without any ventilation and even after regular usage, the Axagon EE35-XA3 becomes a smoldering parallelepiped of heat.

In order to resolve the heat issue, an additional fan can be added to the side of the enclosure, elegantly enough and powerful enough to provide airflow. Please understand that blasting the hard-drive with wind is counter-productive and might even just increase the overall heat. What must be done instead is to use a fan in order to generate wind-flow though the case in order to move out the heat that builds up on the inside of the enclosure and transport it to the outside. With that being said, the power of the fan is not as much relevant as devising a way to circulate some air inside the enclosure.

A suitable fan that is found easily is a fan from an old power supply that is usually rated at , the same as the Axagon EE35-XA3 enclosure, and that also seems to cover a suitable large surface. The next part consists in cutting an opening into the enclosure. The enclosure is actually very nice to work with and the aluminum is not too thick to handle.

Now, it looks like polishing up around the edges is the right thing to do. Clearly, a new coat of paint would do well after the cut. Also, it would be nice to remove all that shrapnel and ensure that the inner edges are not too sharp to be dangerous.

The cleanup mostly consists in running a sandpaper bit with a Dremel, just over the edges to flatten out the shrapnel and round the inner edges of the hole that has been cut into the chassis. With the edges cleaned up, now is the time to drill some holes too that will be used to fit the fan. Lastly, some painter's tape is used to protect the edges and some cardboard is stuffed inside the case in order to not accidentally paint the insides.

The formula is always the same:

• one thin coat primer for a better paint grip,
• one coat color paint,
• one ample coat of acrylic-transparent paint to protect the paint

It was decided to just spray-and-pray without meticulously ensuring that all the surface is covered in order to achieve an amateur-or punk-like effect. A paint collimator was built out of cardboard that allowed painting the case indoors.

Finally, after waiting sufficiently between coatings of paint, the final result is obtained.

The cardboard stuffing can now be removed in order to continue with the build. There are several ways to complete the build at this point and one idea is to use PCB spacers inserted into the drilled holes such that the fan can be screwed onto the distancers from above. We've had some good results with nylon distancers. Compared to brass, nylon is a material that is way more receptive of glue compounds and, for this built, it was decided to actually glue the distancers after they were inserted into the enclosure.

Interestingly, even though it was not yet mentioned, the holes are actually tapped - you can observe the tapping device at the top of the image. The holes thus have treads into which the nylon PCB spacers can screw into and with all of that taking place regardless of the glue. In fact, even if the glue would not have been applied, it would have been impossible to rip the spacers out of the holes due to the tapping but a little bit of glue will dry over time and create a much better bond (not that this is the kind of application where frequent removal would be desired, as we'll see later).

It's now a good time to check how things will fit together in the end, and, taking a look at the enclosure upright, everything seems swell, even with a fan already fit onto the spacers and above the cut hole.

Initially, the idea was to drill a round hole, matching the fan geometry, but then it was deemed that the effort to drill the hole would have added just marginal returns to the actual solution to heat problem within the Axagon EE35-XA3 enclosure which consisted in adding a fan. A circular hole might have needed a cup-drill, and interestingly crup-drills are not available for the Dremel, more than likely because the Dremel is meant for handwork jobs, not construction. Either way, the losses of wind current when the fan operates when having a rectangular hole compared to a circular hole, seem mostly marginal especially since the fan generates a centrifugal force that wants to focus the wind right in front of the fan.

The internal blue PCB of the Axagon EE35-XA3 is very clean and neatly executed, without any of the typical symptoms of sloppy soldering. There is also a lot of space in a PCB clearing away from the SATA connector that seems a good candidate to mount a fixture where the wires of the fan will be connected.

Without further ado, two miniature holes are drilled into the PCB and, our favorite, a JST connector is passed through the PCB. The cool part about this is that the PCB does not ground-fill the entire surface such that the unpopulated area of the PCB does not contain any copper that could short the connector. JSTs are always very elegant to work with, they provide excellent electrical connection and also have a mechanical latch that prevents accidental removals of the wires - contrasted to say, Dupont cables, that are a nightmare to deal with because the only thing holding them in place is just pure mechanical force and friction.

The next step is to route , directly from the power jack, to the fan using Ethernet wires. This is done on the back of the PCB from the jack and to the two protruding pins of the JST connector. The wires are then tidily pushed under the plastic part of the closing flap for a neat result.

Plugging in the enclosure starts the fan, and everything seems to work well such that the next step is to reassemble everything together.

Now the Axagon EE35-XA3 is a cute product that uses Apple decisions, such as using aluminum but also falls into the trap of buying too much into the "rack" terminology. Let's be fair, a single hard-drive will never constitute a "rack", even if we forego any commentary on all of this being consumer hardware and not enterprise. These cases used to be called "enclosures" but probably Western marketting techniques relabled such "hard-drive cases" as "racks", when, in fact, it's really just a box with a SATA-to-USB enclosure. You might say that that is too deep of a thought and too pragmatic, however the following images should clarify that letting yourself be deluded can actually lead to very material and pragmatic results that are pretty bad.

So, what are those atrocious plastic slices at the bottom of the image you ask? Well, these are what are supposed to be "rails" in order to properly slide the hard-drive such that it does not wobble around inside the case. Rails?!! What for?! This enclosure is not meant for "fast removal" because it will be closed all the time! Indeed, adding "rails" is a funny decision because this is not only not a "rack" but there is no live-or-hot maintenance having to be done while the drive is spinning such that there is absolutely no reason to add these rails.

Furthermore, those … nipples, for the lack of a better word, are meant to fit inside the mounting holes of the hard-drive and, as you might have guessed, probably even the designer bet against themselves when designing the case because they do not fit tightly inside the hole but rather fall off making these rails funny and cumbersome to use. Also, as you might observe, one of the nipple is torn off, which is why we now understand why this was a second-hand and returned item.

With all that being said, why even bother with the nipples? Why not just drill holes and screw-through into the mounting holes of the hard-drive instead, which will make a better fit at no cost given that "fast removal" or replacement of the drive is ridiculous because the case is screwed close anyway!

If "overthinking" or "over-engineering" ever had a meaning, then this is it!

Voila! The screws now fit perfectly and hold the plastic rails in place properly. Aside from the exuberance of calling the design out, it is important to remind that without the rails, the drive ends up mechanically wobbling inside the case such that just tossing the rails is not really a desirable option. Either way, the problem is now solved as well.

Architectural changes are required to survive global warming and it becomes clear that highly gentrified zones will develop a different thermal profile that will require revisiting cooling options. The Axagon EE35-XA3 is not a bad case - for an area of the planet, where is average temperature, but at the aluminum heats up as a smoldering fireball and literally roasts the hard-drive inside it. Unfortunately yet interestingly or surprising, the design flaw of the Axagon EE35-XA3 is that the aluminum case is that it does not connect the hard-drive metal to the aluminum in order to conduct heat to the metal case - which is what your intuition would have led you to when you purchase a "metal enclosure" for a hard-drive.

The fan solution provided is actually very good and in testing with S.M.A.R.T. via smartctl there was a drop of about noticed on the hard-drive's own sensors. This is a huge difference because heat is extremely detrimental to spinning drives due to temperature differences shrinking or expanding the metal such that errors are produced much easier when the heads move across the metal plates of the drive.

• the fan turns on when the jack is inserted bypassing the switch; either:
  • remove the switch altogether (because, who cares, it is only important to properly close the filesystem session properly, powering the hard-drive off via a switch or pulling the cable AFTER the filesystem is closed is entirely ambivalent),
  • pass the fan through the switch
• add a grill-mesh to the top or the side of the enclosure to better evacuate heat,
• use tiny fans, maybe mounted on the side (now vertical top) of the enclosure in order to pull out the heat towards the top,
• add a potentiometer to the side of the case in order to be able to control the fan speed (fancy, but useless practically),
  • add a sensor and make the speed variable via an ESP controller (cool, but too much edo),
• overclocking the fan is possible with a small step-up regulator that would overdrive the an to about making it spin much faster (nice, but the point is not to blast the chassis with wind but rather to increase wind circulation),
• create a wind tunnel / collimator that focuses the wind from the fan like a volcano directly into the case (nice, but maybe later)