Cosmos - My First Impressions

think thats bit too much ;)

Shame theres no space on the side panels for a nice 120mm exhaust fan or on the other side just taking all that hot nasty air out.

Guess it sorta defeats the cosmos in the silence factor though;)
 
Here we go then, my first go with the dremel and first mod in general.

Just to recap, my initial problem was that I wanted to fit 8 hard drives into the Cosmos (which has only 6 hard drive bays) and I wanted to improve the cooling.

I decided to get a Lian Li EX-33A internal HDD bay converter. The idea behind this purchase was that I'd use the top 3 bays of the converter to place my 2 x 15,000 rpm Cheetah hard drives (the hottest running out of the 8), and leave the bottom one free for air flow. I purposely chose the 3in3 converter over the 4in3 converter for better air flow.

I also wanted to have a fan at the front of the case which would draw in cool air to actively cool the cheetahs as well as help draw up air through the Cosmos's hard drive bay area, similar how smoke gets sucked out of a car window when you're having a fag while driving :)

Pics and descriptions of my mod to follow. Click on the images for hi-res versions.


The box and its contents:



HDD Module with fascia removed:



Next the fan was removed. Take note of the rubber grommets and 3-4 pin converter:



I put the module upside down in the clamp and masking taped the areas I wanted to keep:



Using a dremel, I cut out the marked area:
 
Using the dremel again, I smoothed out the nasty rough edges. Hard to tell by the photo but it was smooth enough to slide finger along it:



I then installed blowtrim around the edges to hide the imperfections of my cut and just cuz its cool stuff!



Time to install the drives. First rubber grommets were screwed directly into the drives themselves. The grommets had a slit in them which allowed them to snap into place when installing into the module. Notice I also braided the fan cable:



The module was finally installed into the Cosmos case. It was slid into the bay area via the front and locked into place using the Cosmos's push-button drive locking mechanism. Although in the photo you can see the hdd module behind the Cosmos bay covers, that's purely down to the camera flash.



And now the whole reason of doing this mod becomes clear:



I've probably gone into too much detail over what most will consider a small mod but its my first time and I wanted to record it :)
 
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Thanks guys :)

Is it worth me cutting out the honeycomb vents you can see in the photo below?

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