Sunday, April 15, 2012

HT100 with 3.5" HDD

One of the challenges with small form-factor cases is space for hard drives. One of my hopes for the HT100 was that it could fit a 3.5" HDD and in my initial testing of the HT100 it appeared it could not. Mounting the 3.5" HDD as it was supposed to be under the ODD tray completely blocked the Gelid Slim Silence i-Plus HSF on the Sandy Bridge CPU I was testing with. For some reason today it dawned on me: what about turning it 90 degrees? Well, it turns out this works even though it's secured with only one screw. The one screw is sufficient and it's very secure. This means the HT100 can support a 3.5" HDD as long as the CPU HSF is 28mm or less. That is a game changer.

All this is in this little case now: G620 CPU, H61 mini-ITX motherboard, Gelid Slim Silence i-Plus HSF, Kingston 4GB RAM (low-profile), 64GB Kingston SSD, 750GB Western Digital HDD, Powercolor HD5450 GPU. I'll get it hooked back up to a monitor and keyboard and to some stress/thermal testing tomorrow.

Here are pictures of the HDD installed under the ODD tray turned 90 degrees.



2 comments:

  1. Yo Dougie Fresh,

    Could this be used as a HTPC with internal storage ? In my case i would just up the HDD to a 2TB WD green ... see the xbmc forum ' windows build 5 ' where i replied ;)

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  2. Hi Ruben, the manufacturer no longer has these in stock so we've been unable to stock them for a long time now. Honestly, our line of mini-ITX cases don't fit a 3,5" HDD.

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