Day 3 -- Hard Drive and Other Components Go into the Case

After the successful test of the chip, motherboard and graphics card, it is time to put the components in the case.   Our case is the Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel.  One fun aspect of this case is the LED fan light, which will make a great impression when the computers are finished.  The lights are even in St. Mark's colors -- Go Lions! 

 We opened up the cases and first installed the power supply in the bottom, making sure that the cooling fan for the power supply was on top:

Next we installed our DVD/CD drive (the drive that reads and writes to CDs and DVDs) and our internal hard drive.

       

Our DVD/CD drive is an ASUS DRW-241st (optical drive).  It has a 2MB cache (can hold 2MB chunks for storage),  has a pretty good write speed (24x) and interfaces using the SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) bus interface.  Our hard drive is the Samsung Spinpoint F3, which provides one Terabyte (1T) of file storage!

To install the DVD/CD drive, the students took apart the front of the case.  The DVD/CD drive slides in from the front.

  

To install the hard drive, the students have to remove one of the fans also on the front of the case.

  

Then we talked about how the motherboard would be installed  -- We're almost done with the installation of the parts.