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Installing the Hard Drives Parts used: Western Digital Hard Drives (2): Model WD2500YS 250Gb, SATA 3Gb/s interface, 7200 rpm, 16 Mb cache.

I have always had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. I purchased two of these intending to run them in what is called a "mirrored RAID" setup. That means one drive keeps a mirrored copy of the other at all times and if a drive fails, in theory no data should be lost. It is about the same speed as one drive, maybe a tad slower, and is not the usual setup for a gaming PC. But it is fast enough and not having to worry about backups too much is a nice feature for a fairly low price. Hard drives are a good buy these days! The drives configured fine as a single volume RAID 1 (mirrored) drive in BIOS but Windows Vista let me down and wouldn't install with these drives configured in a mirrored RAID. Since Vista won't let me do what I wanted, if I had it to over I probably would have bought one 10,000 rpm drive. The advantage of that would be a little more speed, the disadvantage is a little less reliability and a little more heat. I probably will get an external SATA drive for backups eventually, for now I can use the CD burner or DVD burner for backups. The Lian Li case has a hard drive cage that is removable with, you guessed it, thumbscrews, which makes it quite easy to install the drives. I kept one space open between them for air flow. Lian Li even supplies plenty of mounting screws for hard drives,optical drives, and floppy drives.

The hard drive cage. It holds five (5) 3.5 in. drives mounted vertically.

The Western Digital 250 Gigabyte drives installed in the cage.

The hard drive cage with drives back in the case. Note the large 120 mm fan in the front of the case blows directly on the hard drive cage.

Jump to: Select a Page 1 - Introduction 2 - The Idea 3 - Choosing the Parts 4 - Installing Motherboard 5 - Installing CPU 6 - Installing Memory 7 - Installing Graphics Card 8 - Installing Power Supply 9 - Installing Hard Drives 10 - Installing Bay Devices 11 - Wire Up - 1st Power Up 12 - BIOS - Vista - Drivers 13 - Installing Fan Controller 14 - Installing Case Light 15 - Conclusion  < Page 8 | Page 9 | Page 10 >

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