need opinions on modding my HDD casing

i want to get rid of that ugly metal casing that my hard drives/cd drives etc. are in ... and i was thinking of using four metal poles and widening the casing there to 5.25 inches and using Zalman heat pipes to cool the HDDs ... the only hard part so far as i can see is about installing the CD drives and Floppy disk drives .. and was wondering if anyone had seen anything like this or had any ideas or knew of a website that sells that kind of hdd/fd/cd casing


http://forums.majorgeeks.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=10477&stc=1

 

Do you have access to a welding bay? If so, I'd get some fairly chunky hollow D-profile metal bars and fabricate a metal drive cage out of that.

Of, of course ,you could go with the tried and test method of using some flat sheet material of the correct width whith holes drilled into (e.g. clear/uvreactive acrylic)

 

i was thinking that too then cover it it up with a lightstrip ... but the screw holes don't match up .. like im at a loss as to how to get the floppy and CD drives to fit into it

 

Drill the holes yourself! That way you can make sure they're in the right positon

 

yea ... i figure acrylic sheets would be easier ... and i figure i could use tubing of some kind to fill the distance between the FDD and the acrylic

but won't acrylic keep the HDD ungrounded? cause the zalman cooler has this grounder wire that seems to need to be attached to the metal casing ... any ideas on a work around for that? http://www.zalmanusa.com/usa/product/view.asp?idx=74&code=019

 

oh .. ihave western digital 800JB and 2500JB those are 80 and 250 gigs w/ 8MB cache if that is any help ... ill check their website to see if it has any info on the grounding issue