Restoring my Vulcan HD - Progress report

[Steven Hirsch <snhirsch@gmail.com>]

This has been an interesting project.  The MeanWell power supply arrived last 
week.  Good news is that it's nominally small enough to fit in the Vulcan 
chassis.  Bad news is that most of the PCB components on the AC input side of 
the board had to be removed and/or relocated in order to clear the power 
connector and on/off switch.  A bit tedious, but not rocket science.  The 
input connector and PCB mount fuse are gone, to be replaced with hard-wiring 
and an inline fuse holder.  A couple of caps had to be unsoldered and laid on 
their sides.  Biggest hassle was the air-core inductor.  I had to extend all 
the leads and sort of stand it up in the air between the switch and the AC 
input connector housing.  The PS is now mounted on the chassis bottom and 
clears everything at the end.

The original fuse holder on the side of the chassis will have to go 
completely, since it interferes with the power output header.  I'm planning to 
 slice off the external portion of the holder and super-glue it into the 
square hole to preserve appearances.  There's plenty of room for a small 
inline holder internally.

The cooling fan needs to be replaced with a thinner version in order to clear 
the PS heatsink.  Fortunately, it's exactly the same hole spacing as a 
commonly used PC CPU heatsink fan - plenty of them in the junkbox.

Last problem is the location of the hard drive power connector.  With the 
Molex connector plugged into the drive, it will not clear the power supply 
output connector :-(.

So, here's the part I need some feedback on:  If I turn the drive upside down, 
the power connector clears with plenty of room to spare.  What I am not sure 
about is the wisdom of operating the drive long-term in this orientation.  In 
years past, drive vendors specified orientation as one of the physical 
mounting parameters, but I cannot find anything on the Conner CP3104 that gets 
to that level of detail.  I believe Seagate bought out Conner, but they have 
next to nothing on their website under Conner and absolutely nothing on this 
model.

Any opinions on running the drive upside down?

Steve