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Building:Well now that we have decided on the parts to use lets get down to building the boxes. I'll mostly be dealing with how I build them but will try to suggest ways of doing things for if you are building the even cheaper version I mentioned above. Parts:Well all the parts soon began to arrive. First was an IDEPlex and a couple of drives just to make sure everything worked. Here is a picture of four drives connected up to my workstation. The IDEPlex is hidden inside the open drive bay. 
Well everything worked fine so time to order everything. I had a surprise when I went back to the supplier off which I purchased the four drives for testing. This supplier who will remain nameless (They have lovely special offers every day) informed me that they only had 30 in stock (I needed 50) and that he could only let me have 20 of them and there was no way he could get me more due to Maxtor not suppling them. Well one distributor down I began calling around and looking for anybody who stocked the 100GB drives(there is not a massive demand for these apparently) well I struck pay dirt with Ahead computers when I asked about for 50 drives I was told that they didn't have them in stock but could get them in a couple of days no problem. In the end I purchased the guts of three of these computers from these fine people. Well after about a week some very large boxes started arriving. Building:Well the first task I had was to fit the hard-drives into the caddies that would hold them in the cases. Second was to start fitting everything into the cases. This is where I first started to think "God will everything fit". I had planned on fitting the IDEplexs on the side of the cases in some way but quickly realized that there was no way this was going to work as there just was not enough space. The cases come with screw down fasteners for holding big PCI cards in place and also have guides at the back for holding full length cards in place. I then decided that it may be possible to hold the IDEplexs using the mounting designed for the cards. The IDEplexs come in mounting brackets to fit into a 5 1/4 inch bay. The first step was to cut notches in the card guides located at the back of the case. There are about 7 guides but they are all located over to one side of the case in line with the PCI slots. Well this was no good for me I had to have them spread out. Well thankfully they are removable and there are mounting holes for them across the full width of the case. So using a wire snips a small groove was cut at the right heights.  The screw down holders for the cards were then removed there were two long holders and five smalled holders. I cut groves in the two larger holders and put them back in appropriate positions to hold the IDEplexs. The purpose of these was to actually hold the cards up and to put some forward pressure on them to hold them into the grooves on the card guides. I then used some of the short holders unmodified on the sides of the mounting brackets of the IDEplexs to keep them pushed toward the card guides. This resulted in a very steady and very strong mounting. It also meant that the cards could be removed by only loosing five thumb screws. 
Cabling:Now came the fun part actually fitting all the cables. First step was the strip the cases a bit. 1. Remove the three large 120mm fans mounted behind the drives. This involved undoing a thumb screw for each fan and simply unplugging it. 2. Once the fans are out you can remove the fan holder which involves removing two screws on either side of the case. This now allowed for easy access to the back of the drives. First I slightly tidied up the power cables. This simply involved using a few cable ties to make sure the cables ran neatly. Next was making the IDE cables. I chose to make my own IDE cables instead of buying premade cables. This had the following advantages. Most of the IDE cables you buy have space for two IDE devices and since I was only going to be attaching one device per channel this would be a massive waste. Also the unused connectors would be taking up space which I could not afford since space was going to be a little tight. Also the cables would most likely end up being too long so I would have to tuck the excess cable away some where again this would have taken up a lot of space. When I got the cases I realized that I could not simply run the cables straight up from the drives as this would greatly affect the airflow around the drives and with 16 drives packed closely together I didn't want this. So I decided I would have to run the cable horizontally across the case and then vertically at a point where it would not interfere with the airflow. The only problem with this there was not enough space between the drives and the fans to run horizontal cable so to get around this I decided to split each cable in to half (Giving 20 strands in each cable). This was then ran horizontally from the drives to the space between drives where it went vertically up to the top of the case.  I used cable ties to group the cable together for neatness and so they were not likely to move around over time and block the airflow. Normally I would frown at using cables ties on IDE cables since it makes it harder to remove drives and replace them but since all drives are in caddies this is not a problem. Next the fan mounting and the fans are re-fitted. Motherboard:All that was left now was to fit the motherboard and actually connect everything up. After the motherboard is fitted. All other cables are connected up. The power and reset buttons, the IDE cable for the CD-ROM the floppy drive cable and the SCSI cable for the IDEplexs. After this the IDEplexs them selves are fitted in place. Next the IDE cables from the drives are connected to the IDEplexs. Next the SCSI from the motherboard to the IDEplexs. And finally the CD-ROM and floppy are connected. Next Previous Contents About the author, Mark Kilmartin.
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