Epic!
Cool to see, because over the years, my system has become something similar to yours. But less neat, haha!
What's very similar is that it is a Core 2 system in an Antec P180 (vs P182), and 10 HDDs* + DVD
. And Corsair HX620W! I also used a Scythe Hard Disk Stabilizer x4 in the top area.
What is different is that my others components mostly seem bigger... Makes a proper organisation a bit more difficult. My graphics card is a Radeon 4870 (pretty long card, the PCI-E power connectors need to share space with the connectors for the middle HDDs) with the much-too-large Arctic Cooling Accelero heatsink (+12CM fan), my processor is cooled by a large Scythe Ninja (+12CM fan). And below that I have the RAID card and a Creative X-Fi soundcard. Also a 2x SATA3 card, but it is now unused because I bought the RAID card. I used to do crazy things like use the eSata on the backplate of my motherboard and loop it back inside to connect an internal HDD, hehe. I had to remove my Zalman MFC1 fancontroller because I needed the DVD-bays for HDDs, so now I am using the floppy drive bay just like you. I have a Scythe Kaza Q8 there, which I really like, becayse it's black and can control 8 fans (I have 7 connected now), while it's only 3.5"
.
When I started with this sytem I already cut out most of the metal mesh of the 2 front ventilation/fan areas, and I usually leave out the dust filters. I did the mod with the little fan doors you see on the forums where you remove parts of the 'blinds' to improve airflow. I have put a 12CM fan in front of the top 4 bays, but it has been 'installed' there mostly with packaging material (hey, it isolates vibrations!
) and duct tape. Not neat, and no dust filtering... Trying to make my case not look like a total mess of cables was quite a challenge, because the P180 lacks some of the cable management the P182, mostly the behind-the-motherboard stuff. Plus I never used a soldering iron or any heatshrinking things.
I have now hit the limit of how many drives I can fit in the case, so these days I was already looking at the middle part, to see how I could fit 4 HDDs in there instead of the normal 2. Could you provide more details about how you installed the Scythe Stabilizer there? I do not recognize the material you used there (that same stuff you used for the 10th drive in your v4.5), what is it? I will personally be a little bit demanding when I do it myself, because I want/need my case to be transportable without my drives jumping around my case. And if possible, it should not be a 1-hour job to remove 1 drive when I need to
. Is there anything you would do differently if you would have to do it again? Or do you have any suggestions for me?
For me it would be a good solution if I can install my Scythe Stabilizer in the middle, because then I can try to order a
Lian Li EX-36A2 for the top. (Try, because it appears to be very hard to get, I have been waiting for a shop for more than a month now.) Then I would not have to bother about proper installation and cover for the top fan because the Lian Li already has it. And I will be able to fit 2 moreHDDs total than I can have now, plus two SSDs!
The Corsair HX620W is still keeping up with it's job, keeping all of this running, after so many years! I am quite impressed
. (But it does need to be opened some time, it has a bunch of large blobs of dust in there.) I did try to spread out my drives as much as I could, for example trying not to connect 4 drives to the same cable. Did you connect 3, 4 or maybe more of your RAID drives to the same cable? I was thinking that because they are in RAID, they could all spin up or be very active at the same time, needing the most power all at the same time, I was not sure it was able to deal with that peak. Especially because they are 7200RPM drives, not 5200RPM or 5900RPM like most of my other drives.
*Current drives:
5x 1TB Samsung F1 HD103UJ. I have 4 of these on my RAID controller (because it has only 4 ports), running a smaller RAID-0 partition as a system drive, and a large RAID-5 GPT partition using the rest of the space for storage. The 5th drive is for backup, and to use as a spare later, to rebuild the RAID-5 array when one of the other 4 breaks (pretty likely, because these 5 are the oldest drives I have.)
2x 2TB Seagate ST32000542AS (an LP model)
1x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 (other model because I bought it later than the other 2)
1x 2TB Hitachi 7k2000 (HDS722020ALA330)
1x 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRX
DVD Sony DRU-190A. It's a PATA drive. I actually had a SATA DVD drive, but I was running out of SATA connectors on my motherboard, so I traded it with someone for this one.
I would be curious to hear from you
. Our experiences seem quite similar even though they are pretty exceptional (stuffing so many drives in this case and still running Windows are both not very 'expected' I think, aka crazy
). Maybe we can learn from each other!