Re: GS in desktop case

[nathan@subzero.winternet.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <4q9256$h6i@ganesh.lm.com>,
Matt Portune <mportune@telerama.lm.com> wrote:
>I'm considering moving the GS into a desktop case identical to the one I 
>built the PC into, but I have some questions.  First off, since the holes 
>in the case will in no way match the ones on the motherboard, what's the 
>best way to mount it in the case?

   I was going to do this a few months ago, but gut sidetracked for a
while. It's still on my list of stuff to do eventually. What I'd
planned to do was take a sheet of clear plastic for insulation, and
use tiedowns to anchor the motherboard on that. With that, you can
match the hole spacing any way you wanted to. Another way might be to
get 1/2" rubber pads, use them to do the spacing, and use flexible
tiedowns to anchor the motherboard.

>  Second, if I take the Apple 3.5 drive 
>out of it's plastic case, is the mechanism basically a normal internal 
>3.5 drive that can be mounted in a bay?

   From what others who've done this before have said, I think it's a
bit larger than a 3.5" HH drive, so you'll need a space, probably a
half-height 5.25" space with some sort of mounting brackets.

>  Third, all the SCSI toys will be 
>internal, so how do you rig the RamFAST to run internal cabling?  I have 
>more questions, but I'll leave it at that for now.  :)  Thanks!

   I currently have a black minitower housing most of my scsi chain
(235MB HD, Floptical). Inside it, there's one scsi cable with a 50 pin
centronics connector (the trapezoidal shaped one used on 95% of scsi-1
drives) on the end, and then 6 connectors on a 2-foot cable that are
the 50-pin rectangular that drives actually want. (Total cabling
length is under 4 feet, which is real nice) I got that custom made
from Alltech for about $20, and it suits me real well.

   You can try calling them up and see if they'll do either a 25-pin
scsi D-shell (the one on the back of the GS) to 50 pin set of cabling,
or if they have the pinouts for the ramfast's connector, do a ramfast
-> devices cable.

   I'm probably going to leave my setup as is for now, even if I go
to everything in one box, because I can connect up external drives to
my setup now if I want, just drop them before the minitower. [Useful
if you ever want to drop in a zip for a few minutes.] Yeah, that does
add 18" of cabling, but the system's rock solid as is.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
# And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the
# Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in
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