So what makes this case so special? The structural rails running from left to right as you see here. The rails are designed with the option of handing drives, or cooling fans from them. No other case I have found has 2 rails in them. Many have one rail. The second here is a bit of a scarcity. So now all we need to do is get rid of all the crap we don't need. Be sure to save the odd bits for future projects.

The case is as empty as a Comdex convention without the Microsoft booth's go go girls... we really removed everything we could here. The front fan plates, and fan, the drives, drive housing, the floppy housing, the hard drive mounts, speakers, the rear panel, and the motherboard mounting plate. Everything we could. With the case stripped you can really see just how much room we really have to work with in this case. There is alot more room for alot more drives if you used regular form factor drives in this mod. But that's not what was doing here now is it....

So here is the pile of future project scrounging and idea giving crap we tore out of this case. As you can see the carnage is actually quite extensive. The motherboard mounting panel is the more interesting tidbit in this tearout I suppose. As the drive caddie mounts directly to it you could make an open air system, or a submerged system really easily with some minor tweaking.

Our first major move, the power supply frankly just is too much in the way in the case. The power supply is mounted to the case with a plate it screws to, and that plate mounts to the case itself. After careful inspection we chose to bump out the power supply to make room for more drives in the case. It took some trial and error on the spacing as we didn't take into account the SCA to SCSI adapter's depth. So learn from my mistake, factor in all given information before you make that final cut. We did have to move the power supply out far enough that the fan was actually half inside and outside the case. We moved the sticker to cover half of the fan so we could take full advantage of the extra fans pulling air out of the case.

We finally chose some aluminum posts and screws we found at Lowe's to kick the power supply out from the case, and hold it securely. We had to drill out the holes to 1/8 to accommodate the larger size of the posts. But after we secured them tightly, the power supply wasn't going anywhere. We ended up stacking 3 of the posts per rail to give the needed depth; it turned out to be about 3 inches.

So now we needed to hot wire the power supply. As there is not a motherboard to plug into, or control the power supply we have to jump some wires in the ATX connector. I believe we jumped the green and black right next to it. Here I used a piece of wire to make sure it would work. Later I took the same power supply and spliced into it with a rocker switch I got at Radio Shack, so I could power it on and off from the front of the case. Just a special note. Be careful when dinking around with electricity. There are some "dummy loads" out there for ATX power supply testing that will work just the same and not directly endanger your life.

Drives, drives, drives. Here is a close up shot of the drives I used. They are the same width and height as a normal drive, their thickness, however, is something unusual. There are SCA drives out there that are the normal thickness, just be careful what you buy when it comes to SCA drives. I had a friend order his drives to build out a similar project like this and he ended up getting all 5" behemoths instead! If you are armed with the model number you can check Google or the manufacturer's site and get really detailed specs on dimensions, power consumption and BTU output to help you make the most educated decision you can. Or..... You can modify an old filing cabinet to hold 35 5" 9 GB drives.

So now to start hanging the drives. The rail's holes line up with the drives perfectly. Mount the drives with a 1/2" gap between them. You should be able to get 7 across very comfortably. Mount them so the SCA plug is facing the front of the case for the front rail, and facing the rear of the case with the rear rail. Make sure to ground out the case, drives, and your self before getting too involved here as the older SCA hardware seems to be more static sensitive.

So here is the case with all the drives installed. Very cool looking isn't it? So at this point you may have to move it... the case and drives together will weigh about 50 LBS or so. So be careful not to hurt yourself here. Once you have the drives all mounted double check that all the screws are nice and tight.

So here is the SCA drive adapter. It's a simple little device. Just a SCA plug on one side, and the power, 68 Pin and some jumpers on the other. The jumpers are what you use to assign each drive an ID in the chain. Assign your adapters their ID's before you install them in the drives as it can be really tricky to change the settings when they are installed in the case. These are really rugged pieces of hardware, the only item of concern I had with them is the fit of the plug to the SCA adapter is a bit loose. Just enough that the adapter can rock forward and give the drive a 12V kiss, thus killing the drive. So just watch the spacing between the drive and these adapters.

So here is the final shot with all the SCSI cabling done, the Power run, and the jumpers set. I did have to use about 6 Power "Y" cables to get enough leads from the power supply we used. Be sure to keep the cabling tight and clean on this final step. The cleaner and tighter the cabling is the better the airflow in the chassis will be. So now all we really need to do is work on some cooling solutions and fire this one up.