Mounting a hard drive underneath desk

forgotmyname

The problem with it being an IKEA desk is that your going to struggle to find actual wood to put screws into.

Cut open a few IKEA pieces of furniture and there is a lack of actual wood and just chipboard at the edges.

Many of the panels are a laminate with a corrugated board inside.

Murmansk

Chipboard is perfectly able to accept screws, my whole computer is supported on straps screwed to chipboard. The OP's only wanting to support something very light by comparison.

forgotmyname

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82033770#Comment_82033770

But it's only chipboard at the very edges where the original fixings are, the centre section is corrugated flimsy board in a zigzag pattern.

Put a screw in the middle of the board your likely to find only the 2/3mm of board and nothing inside.

Example of what you are likely to find is this…

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/adzo1j/ikea_because_particle_board_is_not_cheap_enough/

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82033280#Comment_82033280

You're losing me.

You started talking about putting PCs on floors & then you moved to enclosures on floors, desks & on top of PCs.

What are you actually talking about placing somewhere? An enclosure or a PC?

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82033306#Comment_82033306

Yeah I wasn't under the illusion that it was actual wood.

To be fair it's a decent enough desk actually. The top is actually fairly solid & can take a good amount of weight.

But at the end of the day it's just a couple brackets which will weigh naff all & a hard drive enclosure. Haven't put it all on the kitchen scales but I bet it's not much more than 1kg & most of that will be the hard drive.

forgotmyname

They can take a decent amount of weight on the top surface if it's spread across several of the internal baffles. A smaller footprint can
deform the top surface. The underside is often a thinner board also.

As you can see from the picture there is very little for a fixing to actually screw into. A couple of mm of board.

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82034838#Comment_82034838

My size 10s must've been big enough :)

I get what you're saying though.

Still, I'll give it a go. It'll either work or it wont & if it doesn't then it's only the underside that then looks bad.

forgotmyname

Are you fitting spinning rust drives not SSD's?

Curious on the sound if you do go for that option, I think it's going to go either the baffles will dull the sound of the drive spinning
or it's going to amplify the sound?

Anyone done something similar with an ikea hollow top? Maybe it depends on the drives? I notice the sound of the 20TB drives
in my Synology a lot more than the older drives. I did jump from 8TB's to 20TB drives though.

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82035414#Comment_82035414

Not sure what rust drives are

But it 100% wont be SSDs. Although I suppose the enclosure can take SSDs if I needed to. I actually have a USB3 cable which connects direct in to an SSD drive though for access.

It'll be Barracuda, Ironwolf, Blue/Red 3.5" HDDs that I'm talking about.

8TB is the max capacity too. I don't have the spends to be doing anything higher than that at the silly prices of today.

bob2302

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82034694#Comment_82034694

You have your computer and external drive on your desk and you want to get the latter off the desk.

If the computer were on the floor, and the drive were next to it or on top, then the drive wouldn't be on the desk.