I thought I'd be a good idea to use my change in cases for my computer as a teaching tool for the computer club. I'm not going to say that having 8 high-schoolers crowded around your dining room table watching your every move was a bad idea, but lets just say that it wasn't as fun and relaxing as playing with hardware usually is. If I haven't previous been, or are currently their teacher, and used to talking to them, it would probably have been down-right uncomfortable.
I will say that the patient was about as cooperative as I could have possibly hope for though. Taking the pieces out of the old Centurion 590 was way more work than putting it into the giant Cosmos II. The only real issues were that the previous owner had put in a bunch of additional fans that I don't need and they needed to come out. The other issue was that this case has the built-in ability to control
many fans, but their LEDs separately as well. So you can imagine the spaghetti mess of wires coming off of the front panel of this thing. I will say that I was very lucky in that the wiring on my power supply unit were
just long enough to reach everything, but barely!
For those of you who haven't seen this case, I'll say that it was pretty nice to have some extra hands while I worked on it though. This was especially true when we got done and was trying to get it under my desk! But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, so let me back up. I'm not sure that I've ever worked with a case where things were so easy to get inside.
It became apparent to me why the good doctor made his monster so big! It's so much easier to work inside of the cavernous space. I will say though, that putting my two little drives inside of all those bays was a little ridiculous. I was actually confronted with too many options on how I wanted them in all those trays! As it sits, the case will hold 9 more 3.5" drives....and that's not including the 2 "hot-swap bays on the front!
All was not perfect though. We finally finished wiring up and took it into the office to hook up. Of course, I knew the 27.7" height was too much to get under the edge of the desk, so after trying to get it under there by tilting, we ended up having to actually lift one end of the desk to get it under there. That went fine.....then disaster struck. Not only did it NOT boot ("missing NT Boot Loader"), it took me a little while to figure out that it was missing the boot loader because the SATA cable had come off of the SSD with the OS on it. So the BIOS failed to see it at all and loaded a new default version that didn't include that drive in the boot sequence. Therefore, even after I plugged it in, it resolutely refused to acknowledge the there was a boot drive! This took me a nerve racking 5 minutes or so to figure out with the remaining 4 students standing over me watching intently. Inside my head, the Final Jeopardy song is playing with the tic-toc, tic-toc going on as well. Ultimately, after fiddling around inside the BIOS for a few minutes I notice that it wasn't in the boot order, realized what happened and fixed it.
In the end, the monster machine booted and all was right in Propellerheadland.......and all the kids went home reaffirmed that their teacher did in fact know what he was doing.... Oh yeah, it's dead-quiet and runs extremely cool even with all those fans removed.
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