OK, so I don't usually go in for project logs, but the previous owner of this case expressed an interest in seeing what I did with it 
I'm by no means finished at the moment, but hopefully this is of interest to some people.
The Beginnings
For many years and several itenerations, my fileserver UNIMATRIX-001 has lived in a mess of a case, missing both sides and generally too small for what it held. The starting specs for this project were as follows:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Core2Duo e6320
Akase Evo 120 cooler
Seasonic 420w PSU
4x 512mb sticks of DDR2
7 assorted SATA drives, totalling 6tb of storage
To house all of this, I went looking for a massive case, and promptly found that there was practically nothing available to house this many drives and give a decent amount of working space. I then posted on the MM to see what people had sitting around, and one of the things I was offered was a Coolermaster ATCS-310:
Being a full-size, double width EATX case, this looked ideal for my needs, although in stock form a little short on HDD bays.
Building and Modding
With the case in my hands, I set about figuring out the best way to mount a few more HDDs and fit the existing components into it. Helpfully, shadowscotland, the seller of the case threw in a couple of HDD racks for me- THANKS!!
Putting things together for the first time, I discovered that the stock PSU mounting plate would have pointed the 120mm fan into the side of the case- Not good
This led me to fabricate a new mounting plate, with the PSU pointing in the right direction. I initially looked into laser cutting, but this ended up being prohibitive in cost terms, at least for the moment, so I used the ever-handy dremel & ran up a new mounting plate in perspex. This is rather rough at the moment, but is doing the job until I get round to cleaning it up properly with a file:
This image also shows the new 5-drive HDD cage, for which I decided the best position was mounted directly above the PSU. From the other angle, it looks like this:
The next job was to get some components into the case and see how things looked.
Annoyingly at this point, I discovered that the Evo 120 didn't quite fit through the cutout in the back of the case, so I had to resort to fitting the motherboard tray and dropping the motherboard in manually. With the power supply in place, but nothing connected, things ended up looking like this:
That's as far as things have got for the moment- I've decided I need extensions for the 8 & 24-pin cables so I can route them nicely round the back of the motherboard tray instead of being pulled all over the shop.
-Leezer-
I'm by no means finished at the moment, but hopefully this is of interest to some people.
The Beginnings
For many years and several itenerations, my fileserver UNIMATRIX-001 has lived in a mess of a case, missing both sides and generally too small for what it held. The starting specs for this project were as follows:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Core2Duo e6320
Akase Evo 120 cooler
Seasonic 420w PSU
4x 512mb sticks of DDR2
7 assorted SATA drives, totalling 6tb of storage
To house all of this, I went looking for a massive case, and promptly found that there was practically nothing available to house this many drives and give a decent amount of working space. I then posted on the MM to see what people had sitting around, and one of the things I was offered was a Coolermaster ATCS-310:
Being a full-size, double width EATX case, this looked ideal for my needs, although in stock form a little short on HDD bays.
Building and Modding
With the case in my hands, I set about figuring out the best way to mount a few more HDDs and fit the existing components into it. Helpfully, shadowscotland, the seller of the case threw in a couple of HDD racks for me- THANKS!!
Putting things together for the first time, I discovered that the stock PSU mounting plate would have pointed the 120mm fan into the side of the case- Not good
This led me to fabricate a new mounting plate, with the PSU pointing in the right direction. I initially looked into laser cutting, but this ended up being prohibitive in cost terms, at least for the moment, so I used the ever-handy dremel & ran up a new mounting plate in perspex. This is rather rough at the moment, but is doing the job until I get round to cleaning it up properly with a file:
This image also shows the new 5-drive HDD cage, for which I decided the best position was mounted directly above the PSU. From the other angle, it looks like this:
The next job was to get some components into the case and see how things looked.
Annoyingly at this point, I discovered that the Evo 120 didn't quite fit through the cutout in the back of the case, so I had to resort to fitting the motherboard tray and dropping the motherboard in manually. With the power supply in place, but nothing connected, things ended up looking like this:
That's as far as things have got for the moment- I've decided I need extensions for the 8 & 24-pin cables so I can route them nicely round the back of the motherboard tray instead of being pulled all over the shop.
-Leezer-
