I’ve slowly been working on this machine for quite a long time now. I started with a Coolermaster CM Stacker chassis with a micro-ATX form factor mother board. The combination of a large case and small motherboard gave me much room to work with inside! The CM Stacker has 12 full-size bays which I populated with a single optical drive, one hot-swap PATA drive bay, and 10 SATA drive bays. This allows the user to read older IDE drives as well as continually upgrade this machine as larger / cheaper SATA drives become available…
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When it came to the internal wiring, I decided to go in a different direction than what’s popular these days. Instead of hiding the wiring behind the motherboard tray, I thought I’d show it off instead! With the large amount of threaded holes throughout the case, I mounted wire harness clamps and employed careful use of smart cable paths. I still managed to run the cables for the motherboard USB / Audio connectors as well as the standard power / reset wires under the board as I just didn’t have enough cable length to do it any other way cleanly.
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Here you can see a close up of the SATA cable routing. I have put a drop of hot glue at each connection point as this machine will be shipped cross-country and I’ve experienced situations in the past where vibrations of the trip have shaken connections lose (it’s also a good justification for all the wire harness clamps I’ve used). By using both the on-board SATA controller for 4 of the connections and add-on cards for the remaining SATA drives, I got a decent variation in the SATA cable lengths that allowed me to correctly chose a drive bay that was an appropriate distance from the connection point so I had very little slack and no excess wiring anywhere.
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Lastly, here is a view of the small amount of cabling that did actually wind up behind the motherboard tray. As I was using a dual power supply system, I needed to have an ATX motherboard power connector splitter to allow the user to turn on both PSU’s at the same time. As it turned out, running one of the motherboard power cables behind the motherboard tray was the best solution. Notice the teflon tape used where the harness runs over a rather sharp edge…