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Haswell G3 B&W: Will 4 SATA-3 drives AND an SSD fit safely?

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Dear Modsters:


This will be my first Hackintosh build. My challenge is fitting FOUR 3.5" SATA-3 disks and ONE 2.5" SSD into a modded PowerMac G3 B&W mod without melting the retro exterior.

For the drives, I am considering floor-mount vs. 5.25"-bay-mount approaches and would appreciate your experience, particularly about fans and airflow, before I start.


4-BWInside.JPG
PowerMac G3 Blue & White Mod​


Floormount: The original tray on the floor could mount up to 3 drives with the 4th drive in a 5.25" bay. (Spackly used a G5 hard drive cage with 2 drives.)
5'25"-bay-mount: A SATA cage could fill the 5.25" bays with 4 drives and a fan. (superandy07's mod uses a Lian Li cage with the SSD mounted on the side, however draughted and others recommend trimming this area as has already been done.)

Specs:
Gigabyte GA-H87M-HD3 or -D3H Motherboard (HD3 board is smaller)
Intel Core i5-4570S processor (65W, less heat)
Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 1x8Gb to start
Seasonic SS-500ES ATX V2.3 Bulk power supply
1 x 2.5" SSD for OS
4 x 3.5" SATA-3 disks
1 x slim blu-ray burner (optional)
Need a Firewire solution.
Later: Bluetooth, Firewire, video card (much later).
Fans: to be determined. Original fan vents to the back, there is a large hole in the floor under the front for air intake that I think could take a fan. Power supply also has a 80mm fan that should fit case's rear vent.



Primary purpose: home server (cloud server, audio/video capture, transcoding, streaming), later some editing with Final Cut Pro 7.0, Adobe CS3 (if I can run Snow Leopard on the final config).


Thank you in advance for your advice, trailblazers!
Froeschle
 
You should be able to just use 2 of the OEM style drive sleds to put the 4 mechanical drives in and double sided tape or sticky velcro to stick the SSD anywhere you want. You can also fit a 3.5" drive where the zip drive goes.

24342_1.jpg
 
Thank you for the tip! I found a pair of such brackets on ebay the next day. I am still waiting for the case to arrive, otherwise I would have responded earlier.

Next, I will start working on fans. smartmontools should help me monitor if cooling is adequate. I will test with some older 2TB Seagate Barracudas first, my budget doesn't allow for deep frying any of those big-$$$ Western Digital 4TB Reds. I think the aperture in the bottom has been modified to a 120mm or 140mm, looking for a fan that will suck air in with a filter. I will have to see if the original exhaust fan will suck air away from the CPU/memory.

Best,
Froeschle

FYI: I also found a PCI-slot solution for SSDs that might be useful since I'm not really adding much on the PCI bus, the first German link is a cheap mount for 2 SSDs, the US link is a premium removable single SSD-drive version:

http://www.amazon.de/dp/B008R53C9G/?tag=tonymacx8603-21

http://www.amazon.com/Syba-Mount-Mobile-2-5-Inch-SY-MRA25023/dp/B0080V73RE/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1398002185&sr=8-3-fkmr0&keywords=orico+pci+ssd+disk
 
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