Hard Drives in Custom Case

[powerman]

Believe it or not, with all of my @#$% I've outgrown a full ATX case. Well at least when mounting hard drives in every other slot to avoid serious heat problems. Plus its no fun needed a custom/longer IDE cable the the higher drives. So I have decided to build a case out of wood.

What I'm wondering is if hard drives can be mounted vertical instead of horizontal and not have any long term bad effects? Mounted sideways, gravity will effect the spinning of the drive differently.

I think I've seen them mounted this way in some Dell computers, but I'm really wondering if you need a "special" hard drive to do it? Should the el cheapo hard drives be able to take it? (Most of the ones I bought were the sale/rebate deal from stores like Best Buy --> mostly lower end drives)

Instead of:



Instead of the usual horizontal :
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I want to mount them vertical:


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[ChingChang]

Vertical is fine.
Supposedly it is bad to mount them at angles greater than ~20-30 degrees over/under horizontal or vertical though. But 90 degrees is ok.

BTW wood cases are nice. I made one last year. I've been wanting to make another..

[powerman]

Thanks for the reply.

One other question I have about building a wood case is, will the holes the screws go in eventually deterioate after time? I was planning to use screws to hold down pretty much everything.

I'm trying to remember the name of these, but when I put my closet wire shelving together there were these peices you hammered into the drywall. In the center of them, were threads for a screw so they would hold in the drywall. Anyway, I was thinking that these would be great for a computer case because I could use the standard machine screws found in most cases.

I am plaaning to use stronger wood screws for the main supports of the case, but there will be certain places I just need tight enough so they don't wiggle. In addition, I will take these peices off frequently.

So I was just wondering what the name of this peice is and how you dealt with removing peices of your case?

[ChingChang]

Yeah it will get worse over time.

But what I did, was for the motherboard tray (used a wood sheet of thin plywood type stuff), was drill small holes, put a little glue in the holes then screw in the stand offs.

For hard drive/optical drives, I bought longer screws because my drive cage was kind of thick (maybe quarter of an inch). Those just slide right through, and you don't have to worry about those holes breaking up. You should actually have those holes be a little bigger than the screw. I also did the same for the power supply.

Expansion cards I just had use normal case screws, and I figure if it ever gets too bad I could just get a long screw and put a bolt on through the other side.

and the side panels I just used a nut and bolt to attach.. the way I did it is I made grooves on the top and bottom of each panel, so it could slide in and out. Then I drilled two small holes in the back of each, one on top and one on bottom. Epoxied a bolt in there, then attached a 90 degree angle bracket to it with the bolt. The other end of the bracket was attached to the case the same way, although I could have just drilled a hole and glued the screw in there. So if I want to take the panel off, I just unscrew the two bolts on the panel, and the angle brackets can spin around out of the way.

The only other screws I used were some wood screws to help with the supports. They screwed into angle brackets that held up a few supports. And a couple screws for the door hinges. I don't really remove anything other than the side panel.

[ChingChang]

oh I was also wondering what type of wood you are going to use? I forgot to ask before