Stealth drive mod.. i was proud of this!!!

DRIVE STEALTH MOD

Well now is another mod on my poor case. In this respect, it was the drives the wore the brunt of my ham fisted modding hahahaha....

The mod shown below is a HIGH difficulty mod it took me 3 hours all up...

You have to open the drives, solder wires in, do minor machine work to get the plates to fit, solder new LEDS in, etc etc. This is not a mod for beginners. OK?

So lets start. THIS is what my case LOOKED like.

Looks a bit off colour doesnt it. Time to pull things apart.

What to do? what to do? DRIVE STEALTH MOD.

Ok I wasnt just going to stick plates on the front with super glue or tape of whatever. That is soft. I am actually going to pull each drive apart, move the LED somewhere else, and replace the front. I started with my crappy old 50x CDrom.

Time to replace the biege front... what about a blanking place! Righto!

This is whats inside, the circuit board from which i removed its LED and replaced it with some wires.

Put it all back together and see what it looks like.

As you can see, i have glued small square of plastic onto the carrier tray to extend its front further out. To this i attatched the blanking plate which i had cut the tabs off, and used sandpaper to make sure it was all nice and flush and didnt stick.

As you can see here, the plastic tabs extend the tray out so i can stick the blanking plates onto the tray without the tray sticking or hitting the CDROM body.

There you are!!!! the plate is glued on, and here you can see the two fans that cool my Barracuda 4 Hard drive.

Look at that!! NICE... and you can see the wires where i moved the LED from the drive to that front panel of mine, so that when that drive is active the LED glows.

Here the tray is retracted, and it totally blends in. PERFECT!!!!

I now did that with every other drive. The process was the same, take the plate of the front, glue the strips to extend the tray a bit, solder in the new wires, and bingo the drive is stealthed!!.

One thing that i had to watch for was that when the drives were stealthed, they sat behind the normal position, i had to drill some new holes in the carriers so that the drives could sit a bit futher back.

2nd drive done... perfect!!!

All drives done!! WOULD YA LOOK AT THAT!!!

So whats the final look???

NICE!!!!

Points to consider with this mod.

The drives lose their warranty the instant you open them.

You may have to power them up outside of the case to open the trays to do your mods. When they are open, and powered up, POTENTIALY DANGEROUS LASER RADIATION can exit the head. DONT LOOK AT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

DONT TOUCH IT EITHER!!! you will screw it.

Another thing is that there is NO emergency eject. there is also NO manual eject, the only way to eject these drives is to right click the drive in my computer and click Eject. This means that in DOS, you CANT ACCESS THE DRIVES!!!!!

I am considering adding to the mod at a further time by putting eject buttons on the side of the case front, or next to the corresponding LED on the front panel.

As i stated before, you will also have to mod the case to fit the drives, cos they will sit back in the case. Another thing to note when fitting the blanking plates is to make sure they dont hit the drive in any way, and to use small bits of plastic to glue on the tray.

This is what i mean...

Those bits of plastic move the plate forward so the blanking plate doesnt bind on the drive..

Another point to note, and which i might also fix in the future is that when the drives are opened, you can see some of the guts of the drive.. its a bit messy....

So for now, my TODO list includes Moving the eject buttons, and masking some of the guts...

Hope to have helped here!! And once again, if you screw it up, ITS NOT MY FAULT.

L8ur!!!

3/March/2002