Subj : Re: Home Lab
To   : Moondog
From : Dennisk
Date : Mon May 18 2020 19:51:00

-=> Moondog wrote to Dennisk <=-

 Mo>   Re: Re: Home Lab
 Mo>   By: Dennisk to Moondog on Sat May 16 2020 08:18 pm


 >
 >  Mo> I find some humor in the board designers finallly placing ATA and
 >  Mo> floppy headers on the edge of boards instead of the random spots in the
 >  Mo> middle, only to see the devices that used them either e phased out or
 >  Mo> replaced with a newer, thinner standard.  The only benefit I see for
 >  Mo> having the connectors somewhere other than the edges is if the board
 >  Mo> was designed for specific slimline case, and connector location was
 >  Mo> critical to the design.
 >
 > With the roomy cases of the old XT system, it wasn't a problem.  You had roo
 > to put a small dog in the case.  I lost a partition due to a faulty IDE ribb
 > cable.  I must have pulled it in and out of a drive too many times, and
 > something came loose, which I didn't realise until the FAT table got scrambl
 >  SATA connectors are not designed to be pulled in and out much either, but t
 > do plug and unplug easier.
 >
 >
 > ... Dennis Katsonis

 Mo> I've senen my share of monster towers with more bays than you could
 Mo> ever use, but I've also run into quite a few OEM designs where they
 Mo> tried to tuck as many items in the smallest case possible.  For a
 Mo> couple of years ZDS wanted to get into budget mass market systems and
 Mo> resorted to hiring a Taiwanese company to build them and market them in
 Mo> catalogs such as Crutchfield's. These were branded plain jane 486 and
 Mo> 386 clones with 100 Watt psu's and a case that was just big enough to
 Mo> house the main baord, a riser card, a 3.5" floppy, a 5.25" floppy, and
 Mo> a hard drive.  Technically there were 2 5.25" bays, however literature
 Mo> that came with it ignored the second bay because of the low powered
 Mo> psu.  IIRC the psu had a wierd form factor, so finding a larger psu
 Mo> that fit was a no go.

My 486 DX4/100 isn't much bigger.  Just big enough for two floppy drives and
two hard disks.  In some ways, compactness makes things a little easier, ins
ome ways, because you can have the IDE cable reach both the master and slave
drives.  One of my larger cases is more of a problem, because the cable cannot
reach all the drives.  Obviously, longer cables would help but I can only work
with what I have.

I wonder if you could build the case so that the power and data connectors were
in the case itself, with sockets at the back of the drive bay.  Just push the
drives in.


.... Dennis Katsonis
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