Seven ways of adding a SATA drive.
The basis of this was a t5740e plus expansion chassis which was coupled to various other spare parts that Greg had to hand - basically a LSI MegaRAID controller and a 3.5 inch 6TB SAS drive. The OS was chosen to be Alpine Linux x86 which runs perfectly on the t5740.
Initially Greg invested quite some time trying to get the PAE kernel to detect the full 8GB of RAM that was fitted, but eventually gave up when it became clear that PAE just does not work on the t5740. (See the RAM section under the hardware tab and/or the Linux tab for details).
So from his 'useful bits and pieces' collection he'd pulled together a t5740e with expansion chassis, 2 x 2GB of RAM, a 128GB SATA SSD, a LSI MegaRAID controller and a 3.5 inch 6TB SAS drive.
Over to Greg:
Note: I am not in any way promoting this RAID0 single disk solution as best practice for a custom NAS, but hey, this is just utilising spare parts I got lying around and it works just fine for me. You may have similar bits and pieces.
Alpine Linux was installed to the 128GB SATA SSD.
Cramming the 3.5" drive et al in the expansion housing was quite a mission, but is doable. You may need to do a little metal bashing/angle grind here and there to get the clearances you need. I used a single disk RAID0 configuration as it was a single drive I had to hand. Alternatively you may wish to fit two 2.5 inch drives in a RAID1 configuration. The data transfer rate from the SAS drive does get above a solid 100MB/s uncached and up to 200MB/s. It's not great, but not bad either as it allows maxing out the network port.
The RAID controller and SAS drive work fine in the thin client, however the graphical RAID configuration menu that can be triggered at boot time did not work. I ended up transferring the RAID card and drive to another X86 system and configuring it there before moving the card and drive back to the t5740.
Later on I did add a Mini-PCIe card to get USB 3.1 support for local backup/restore from and to the SAS drive. This USB card gave me data transfer rates 150-200MB/s. It's limited to 5GBbits SuperSpeed USB3 mode it seems, but could support up to 10GBits. To make it fit I used a PCIe extender cable so I could fit it in the expansion housing. The USB card needed an external 5V supply which I picked up from one of the 'hidden' USB 2 ports. In order to be able to connect to my new USB 3.1 port I removed the (unwanted) parallel port connector from the rear panel of the expansion housing and ran the USB cable through space it had previously occupied.
The USB card, adapter and USB cable I got from AliExpress. Total cost was maybe $40 (NZ).
I fitted a 4cmx4cm fan inside the expansion housing that I powered from the +5V supply/connector on the riser.
In use the unit gets a bit warm (disk is about 45-46 C), but it is quiet. If necessary I could add another USB fan (powered from the other hidden USB port) to blow air through both compartments, but so far all has been stable and it hasn't been needed.
The end result is neat with it all packaged up in the standard expansion housing. The only oddity is the USB3 cable dangling out of the parallel port slot.
lspci for the two add on cards I used:
02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Broadcom / LSI MegaRAID SAS 2108 [Liberator] (rev 03) 03:00.0 USB controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1142 USB 3.1 Host Controller
In the photo you can see the expansion housing with: