Removing USB 3.0 Male and soldering directly to Female

I have recently gotten my Ranger back online and am now saving for expenses relating to my move to Korea and have been wanting to consolidate my HDD's into one system as well as expand it a bit.

2x 750GB 7200 RPM drives for games and emulation/mod packs
2x 2TB SSHD (1 condition unknown / 1 fully functioning)
One drive seemingly died but the external enclosure was dead. Havent tested drive yet.
1x 5TB Plex (Considering adding another 130USD is an easy buy)

I can fit maybe 3-4 more drives in my Ranger, so I would like to take the drives from my Precision and install into the Ranger, and thus have one less laptop to bring.

I have already tested a mpcie to USB 3.0 with a USB 3.0 Hub (w/ supplementary power) with a couple of drives connected. Machine still posts and drives show up without a hitch. I dont need bleeding edge performance from these HDD's as they are more akin to media storage than application mediums.

The problem I run into is clearance. USB plug is too large and creates a problem of clearance.

Is there anything in particular I should know about USB 3.0? Or is it just a matter of having the wires touch the positive / negative / Ground / VBUS ?

Any insights would be appreciated

 

@TheReciever other than the fact USB 3.0 is 9 pins vs 4 on USB 2.0, there's nothing to know about it.

 

Ahh ok, so if I open up the cable end I should expect to see 9 wires ?

 

@TheReciever yep. You can solder just 4x USB2.0 wires skipping the rest, limiting yourself to usb2.0 speeds but reducing the amount of work.

 

Well while they wouldn't be needed for large file size transfers on the daily it would still be needed to transfer large files.

Alright looks like I need to order a USB cable and get this little project completed.

 

As an idea you've likely considered already, you can get the SATA RAID 0 adapter I showed you and run cable to move the HDD's to the battery bay, as the indents fit two HDD's (4 if you stack them) but will need cutting for the middle HDD bay to fit, which is need anyway for the MSI 1070 IIRC

 

Problem with sata is the height of the cables even with a 90 degree adapter. I'd be soldering it either way to make way for clearance.

With USB 3.0 I can get a little creative. Like 3 hard drives and a USB 3.0 display link monitor graphed to the side as another input for the laptop. I plan to add another 5TB as I have saturated the current 5TB drive, then add 2x2TB storage drives.