I always love building electronics kits, and I usually fix things myself when they break. Most things only have one or two broken parts, but finding those can be difficult. I've gotten so much better with soldering, once you do it right it's easy.
Anyway, I'm going to try doing this next. It's mainly software, which isn't my forte, but the Arduino code makes it easy. I've always wondered how these were done, easier than I thought it was:
I just need to find a lot of drives...
I've seen these before, and they're awesome. Good luck making one. I'd be interested in hearing the result.
The only things I've ever done that are remotely close to this are soldering some sort of chip (microchip? motherboard?) for an alarm for a robotics/electronics summer camp program (it was so long ago that I don't remember the details) and making an Ethernet cable in a routing class I took in high school.
Well, I tried it over the past couple of days and did get it to work. The problems I ran into were mainly caused by floppy cables being weird, I may have to make my own connector or something.
Plus, I only have two drives, and this setup can support up to eight. I need to get more power and more drives.
Hopefully, if you post the results, I won't be too late for them to be relevant for a response. Again, good luck. ;0