| The first step in installing the drives on the front of the case is to stand the case back up. Once that is done, remove the front face plate, if yours has one. Ours has 2 doors that swing open. The method of installing drives in the cases of computer varies greatly from case to case. There is no standard method. If you are not sure how to do it, refer the manual. Our case makes this very easy. The first step is to open the front of the case. Our case is hindged for easy access and it locks with a 3-way key. There are two parts to the front of our case, the outer door and inner casing. Once we open that, we can see the bay covers that came pre-installed. To install our drives, we must remove these covers. This is also made very easy since ours are secured by two standard case screws. On some cases, these are actually attached to the case and they have to be pryed off. These new designs make computer building much easier. For our design, we will remove the top two 5.25in. bay covers and both 3.5in. bay covers. This is accomplished by simply removing the screws and removing the covers. Once this is done, we can now insall the drives. You may want to keep these covers for use in the future. The screws we can keep as well since they are standard. |
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In order to install the drives, we must install the rails on each side of every 5.25in. drive. The purpose of these rails is to allow us to easily insert and remove each drive as necessary. Other cases will have you screwing the drives in to place, however we find that the rails are much more convient and easy to use. To install your 5.25in. bay drives, simply attach one rail to each side of the device. They are held on by small plastic tips that will stay in once installed. Do this for all of your 5.25in. devices, but not your 3.5in. devices. On this case, the 3.5in devices will get screwed in to place. Once the 5.25in. device rails are on. Put them down for a minute and do not install them yet. Now, secure the 3.5in drives by removing the metal housing where those drives will sit. Screw them in using the screws provided in the parts kit or with the drives themselves and use 4 scews on each drive, 2 on each side. This includes the floppy drive and our front header expansion bay that came with the motherboard. Once you have the header installed, you can also connect its cables to the motherboard headers. Once those are installed, we can move on with the 5.25in. devices. |
| Before we can install any of the 5.25in devices, it is important that the jumpers on the back of each drive is set accordingly to how you want them. The 3.5in. devices do not have jumpers. For our setup, since we will have a DVD-burner and a CD-burner, we will set the jumper on the back of the DVD-burner to Master and the jumper on the CD-burner to slave. This sets them up in the best way possible for speed. The Master channel on IDE typically gets first access to resources over the slaved device. If you can not figure out which way to install the jumpers, refer the manual that came with the drive, although most drives have it written on the circuitry right next to the pins or on the underside of the drive. Our drives have it written on the drive just above the jumpers. See the photo at right. |
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Now that the rails have been set in place and the jumpers are set, simply slide the drive in to position on the front 5.25in bays where you want them to be. They will click in to place. For our PC, we are also installing a Sound Blaster Audigy2 Platinum sound card which includes a 5.25in. front mounted interface. We decided to install this in the top bay. When you are deciding where to place 5.25in. devices, we recommend putting whichever device is Master on top and putting the slaved device below it. This makes it easier to connect the data cables on the back and identify the drive letters once the operating system is installed. Windows assigns lower drive letters to Masters and higher letters to Slaves. (ie. our DVD-burner will be drive E: and our CD-burner will be drive F:) |
| When you are installing the 5.25in. devices, make sure that they are locked in place and that their front plates line up. On this case, there is not too much adjustment you can make this, however on some cases that use screws, you can very easily misalign these and it looks bad. Our case lined up perfectly with no adjustments necessary. The image on the right is what our case looks with all of our drives installed including the 3.5in. drive and our motherboard interface. You can also clearly see the 120mm fan intake just underneath the motherboard header block. To the right of the floppy drive, you can see the LED indicator lights for hard drive activity and power as well as the power button itself. At his point, do not yet connect the power cables or data cables to any of the devices in the front bays. It will make it easier to move around inside of the case until we are done with the interior. |
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Once all of the drives are securely in place, replace the front panel, if you have one. On this case, we simply close the door and turnt the key. The image to the left is what we got. Not too bad looking. Unfortunately, the 5.25in. devices we had were not available in black, but the floppy drive was and we put the black face plate on the motherboard header block, so its not too bad. If you can, when buying parts for your case, try to coordinate the colors of your devices. It will look much nicer and a lot more professional if you can have everything matching. Now that we have completed the front of the case, its time turn back to the interior of this computer and finish it off. |
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