Colin Finkle

Industrial Designer. Author.

Three-quarter view of a navy-blue NAS enclosure with vertical ridges, rounded corners and a recessed dark top panel, on a wooden shelf against geometric grey and gold wallpaper.

Raspberry Pi 5 NAS Enclosure

Industrial design of a 3D-printed Raspberry Pi 5 NAS enclosure with a removable shroud that hides the hardware yet opens fully for service.

Front view of the open black chassis with an 8 TB drive in its caddy and red SATA cable, beside the blue ridged shroud standing on the same shelf.
Side view of the open black chassis with an 8 TB drive in its caddy and red SATA cable, beside the blue ridged shroud standing on the same shelf.

Client: Personal Project

Objective: Design a quiet, sculptural enclosure that packages a Raspberry Pi 5, SATA HAT, fan and up to two 3.5″ drives in one compact tower.

Role: concept designer, industrial designer, electronics packaging, SolidWorks CAD, design for 3D printing, prototyping, assembly

Materials: PLA

Manufacturing Processes: FDM 3D printing

Key Challenges: drive orientation and cable reach, vibration isolation, installing the board beneath the drive rails, cooling and dust control, power button access

Outcome: First prints worked with only light trimming. Used only 1.02 kg of PLA and 19 hours of print time, Now running constantly over six weeks with no thermal issues.

My NAS enclosure design was a self-initiated personal project. It replaced my ugly, cobbled-together, repurposed PC home server with something more power efficient and beautiful.

Pencil sketch of a rounded-rectangle tower in two views. The upper close-up shows a raised top rim, a central oval vent and an arrow labelled "Vent air". The lower view shows the full tower on small feet with notes reading "Removable top for access to drives" and "Raspberry Pi I/O + DC input" pointing at a low cut-out.
My first sketch of the concept a Raspberry Pi based NAS with a removable top for drive access and the Pi’s I/O and DC input low on the body.

I constructed and configured a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB with a Waveshare 2 Ch. SATA hat and a 3.5″ hard drive with the option of adding a second. The project became my first purely electronics packaging exercise.

Here I will cover the industrial design of the enclosure. If you are interested in the technical setup, please contact me and I will write up my experience setting up Linux, file systems, shared folders and Docker containers.

The Challenge

My previous home server was a medium-form-factor HP desktop, cut with tin snips and zip-tied to hold as many 3.5″ drives as possible. After its second boot drive failure, I’d had enough. It proved I could make use of a home server, but it was ugly, power thirsty, and unreliable.

Pencil sketch looking down into the open top of a tall rounded tower, with 3.5-inch drives dropped in and cables running beside them. Handwritten notes read "Drop in 3.5 in HDDs", "Air space around the drives", "Convection cooling", "How are the hard drives held down? Trays? Elastics?" and "Data + power to Pi HAT – are they going to bundle and cause issues?"
Margin notes capture the open questions: how to hold the 3.5″ drives down, how to leave air around them and how to keep cables from bundling. Rotating the drives and using OEM HP caddies answered the hold-down and cable questions.

I had a plan to make something right-sized and good looking. I rebuilt around a Raspberry Pi 5: lots of storage, some redundancy, always available, and minimal idle power draw. The Waveshare 2-channel SATA HAT+ allowed the use of larger 3.5″ drives, which are much harder to package than the 2.5″ stacks most Pi NAS builds use but come in higher capacities. The enclosure had to hold the board, fan and up to two drives, filter dust, stay cool and look like a quiet home appliance.

I looked at many Pi NAS builds in the maker community, but they either looked like a mini gaming PC or a cheap imitation of a NAS consumer product.

Unless you stuff it in a closet, a NAS has to sit on a shelf close to your home router. It should not draw attention to itself but it should be presentable. Why can’t it look good? Like a decor item or a sculpture.

Objectives

  • Package a Raspberry Pi 5, 2-channel SATA HAT and up to two 3.5″ drives in one compact tower
  • Keep the board and I/O low, in the coolest incoming air
  • Give full service access to the wiring, board and drives
  • Hide everything in a clean, closed display configuration
  • Keep out dust and hair with washable, printable dust screens
  • Print on a desktop FDM printer with minimal support material

Scope of Work

  • Defined what a home NAS needs from the failures of my previous server: capacity, redundancy, availability and low power draw
  • Collected references: 3D-printed PC cases including Empiricus’ Open PC Frame II (Printables and YouTube build video) and a The Big Boy ITX PC Case (Printables and YouTube build video), the 2012 Mac Pro, Nabob’s 340 g coffee packaging and ridged 3D-printed planters
  • Sketched a layout with the Pi at the bottom and the drives above, modelled it in SolidWorks, then rotated the drives to side-load
Pencil sketch looking down into the open top of a tall rounded tower, with 3.5-inch drives dropped in and cables running beside them. Handwritten notes read "Drop in 3.5 in HDDs", "Air space around the drives", "Convection cooling", "How are the hard drives held down? Trays? Elastics?" and "Data + power to Pi HAT – are they going to bundle and cause issues?"
Margin notes capture the open questions: how to hold the 3.5″ drives down, how to leave air around them and how to keep cables from bundling. Rotating the drives and using OEM HP caddies answered the hold-down and cable questions.
  • Adapted HP OEM drive caddies and designed snap-fit rails to receive them
  • Introduced a removable shroud to separate service access from appearance
  • Designed the chassis around the components as two snap-fit parts
  • Mechanically engineered a swing-arm to connect the motherboards power button to an intuitive slider on the exterior of the case
Exploded isometric render on a white background. A blue ridged shroud floats above a black top dust screen with a square cutout and a green SATA HAT on four standoffs. Below them are a Raspberry Pi 5 with a black swing arm and small orange tab, a black two-part chassis, a flat base dust screen, a 40 mm fan and four nuts. A black drive-rail frame sits at left and two 3.5-inch hard drives in white caddies sit at right.
The final assembly exploded: a lift-off shroud and top dust screen, the Pi 5 and SATA HAT on a two-part chassis, a base dust screen and fan, and two HP-caddied drives that slide in from the side.
  • Prompted AI (Google Gemini, Nano Banana) to restyle assembly screenshots in the language of well-known design brands as a brainstorming exercise. I integrated an Audi-inspired vent reframed the vents as a feature.
  • Detailed the shroud with vents, a ridge pattern and a tidied I/O cut-outs
Rendered three-quarter view from above of a navy-blue ridged enclosure on a reflective grey surface. A raised, rounded rim surrounds a recessed dark top panel, and a thin black base is visible at the bottom.
The shroud’s raised rim frames the recessed top dust screen, so the exhaust path reads as a deliberate detail rather than a grille.
Rendered rear three-quarter view of a navy-blue ridged enclosure on a reflective white floor. Two rounded cut-outs at the base reveal black internals. The left one holds a bright orange power-button tab beside the Pi's connectors, and the right one opens onto more ports. A black base shows below the shroud.
In the chosen colourway, the orange tab is the single accent, marking the one control a user touches, while the low I/O cut-outs keep the Pi’s ports in the coolest air.
  • Designed washable dust screens on the top and bottom. Leveraged the gyroid sparse infill pattern in Bambu labs as a natural dust catching geometry.
  • Used Solidworks Visualize to render various colourways to pick filament
  • Sliced the design in Bambu Labs software. I changed the geometry slightly (added a 45° chamfer) to cut 84 g of support filament
  • Printed the parts on a Bambu Lab H2D with AMS
  • Assembled, trimmed a few fit points and ran the NAS inside the enclosure

Key Innovations

  • A removable shroud over the entire assembly, so that:
    • in the service configuration, the wiring, Pi, HAT and drives are fully accessible
    • in the display configuration, everything is hidden, so the chassis underneath can be purely utilitarian
    • the shroud can be reprinted in a new pattern or colour without touching the electronics
Open black chassis with an 8 TB Seagate BarraCuda drive in its caddy, red and yellow cables and an orange power button, beside the empty blue ridged shroud on a white counter.
Display configuration: the ridged shroud hides all wiring, rails and drives, leaving only the black base visible.
  • A two-part snap-fit chassis (base and drive rails), so that:
    • the Pi and HAT can be installed and screwed down before the rails go on
    • all I/O ports are low and at the back and side
    • each part prints in its best orientation, with the rails printing upright and needing no support material
    • the drives slide out sideways in their caddies with the SATA connectors exposed
A hand sliding an 8 TB Seagate BarraCuda drive in its HP caddy sideways out of the open chassis, with red SATA and power cables trailing to the board below.
OEM HP caddies slide out sideways with the SATA connectors exposed, and their rubber-bushed pins isolate drive vibration.
  • Novel 3D printed dust screen from unique method in 3D printing slicer (Bambu Labs app)
    • Printing with 0 thickness top and bottom layers expose sparse infill patterns for use as a filter
    • Gyroid infill makes a wiggly air path that traps dust and hair
    • A screen at the bottom catches dust coming into the fan
    • A screen at the top keeps dust from settling in the vents
The blue ridged shroud with its open end facing up, next to a black gyroid-infill dust screen with a square cutout, on a white marble counter.
The shroud and its washable top dust screen, printed in gyroid infill with no wall layers top and bottom.

Materials & Manufacturing

  • Materials: PLA throughout. Polymaker PLA Pro in black for the chassis, drive rails, swing arm and dust screens; Polymaker PLA Pro in metallic blue for the shroud; Polymaker Panchroma PLA in orange for the button tab.
  • Processes: FDM on a Bambu Lab H2D with AMS, using a 0.4 mm nozzle for the chassis, rails, arm, screens and tab and a 0.6 mm nozzle for the shroud. The dust screens are gyroid infill with 0 wall layers top and bottom, printed without support.
  • Stock and electronic parts: two HP drive caddies, heat-set inserts, M2.5 standoffs and screws, M3 hardware and 3M bumpons; Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB), Waveshare PCIe to 2-channel SATA HAT+, 40 mm fan and up to two 3.5″ drives (one installed).
  • Totals: seven printed parts, about 1.02 kg of PLA and 19 hours of print time; 217 mm wide x 148 mm deep x 240 mm high.

Design Challenges

  • Drive orientation and cable reach: Top loading threw off the proportions and put the SATA plugs far from the HAT. Rotating the drives brought the connectors close to the HAT and let the caddies pull out sideways.
  • Vibration isolation: Printed rails would pass drive vibration straight to the chassis. OEM HP caddies with rubber-bushed pins keep the isolation, and snap-fit rails receive them.
  • Cooling and dust control: A 40 mm fan draws air through a washable dust screen in the base and up the tower, alongside the Pi’s active cooler. An updraft airflow works with convection and naturally keeps dust from getting sucked in or settling in the enclosure.
  • Power button access: The Pi’s onboard button is fiddly and access was would be challenging even with the shroud off. A printed swing arm carries a side press at the rear I/O to the button, and an orange tab marks the part to touch.
  • Vents as a feature: An Audi-inspired concept turned the vents from a problem into a design element, paired with a ridge pattern that suits printing better than moulding.
  • Support material: A ledge around the chassis required excessive support trees. A 45° chamfer let it print unsupported and cut 84 g of filament.

Results & Impact

The first prints needed no reprints, only trimming at a few fit points, and the NAS has run in the enclosure for about six weeks with no thermal issues.

It now sits on the shelf beside my router as a quiet, classy appliance, and the shroud can be reprinted in another pattern or colour.

Design is never done… at least not entirely. I learned a lot by taking this project to assembly, so there are things I would change. A Mk II of the Pi NAS enclosure would:

  • use thinner or simple mesh dust screens
  • a daughter board moving all of the Pi’s I/O to the rear
  • a thinner and tighter mesh for the dust screens
  • passive, convection cooling 90% of the time
  • a variable-speed fan that stays off until the processor or drives warm up
  • a more playful shroud pattern and a layout needing even less support

The files aren’t published yet; I’ll refine and release them if there’s interest, so reach out by email.

More Photos

Front view of the navy-blue ridged enclosure on a wooden shelf, with a black base and small rubber feet showing beneath the shroud.
Display configuration: the ridged shroud hides all wiring, rails and drives, leaving only the black base visible.
Angled view of the blue ridged enclosure with a base cut-out exposing the Pi 5's Ethernet and USB ports above small rubber feet.
The side cut-out exposes the Ethernet and USB ports, which a Mk II daughter board would move to the rear.
Back view of the blue ridged enclosure with a rounded cut-out at the base showing the Pi's small connectors and an orange power-button tab.
The back cut-out keeps the Pi’s connectors low, beside the orange power-button tab that works the swing arm.
Low-angle close-up of the join between the black base and drive rails, showing a printed snap-fit tab above the Pi's pin header.
Low-angle close-up of the join between the black base and drive rails, showing a printed snap-fit tab above the Pi’s pin header.
A hand sliding an 8 TB Seagate BarraCuda drive in its HP caddy sideways out of the open chassis, with red SATA and power cables trailing to the board below.
The two-part chassis lets the Pi and SATA HAT be installed and screwed down before the snap-on drive rails go in.
Looking down into the blue ridged shroud, with the black gyroid dust screen seated inside and a square cutout at its centre.
The top dust screen seated inside the shroud behind the vents, keeping dust and pet hair out of the exhaust.