PC Building

[BigAl01]

I bet many of us are installing M.2 SSDs now, and given that most motherboards have at least two ports for them, that might be all we need.  When the M.2 format first came out, high prices might have meant that you only got a 512 MB M.2 SSD for your OS installation, and you relied on external SATA SSDs or SATA HDDs for the remaining storage requirements.  But fast forward to 2023, and M.2 drives are getting kind of cheap!  You can easily find a 1 TB M.2 drive for under $100 USD, and even 2 TB M.2 drives are easily found for under $150 USD.  So if you are still using the SATA SSD or SATA HDD interface for more drives, where are you mounting them in your case?

I ask this because modern cases are now removing the external SSD or HDD cage mounting enclosure but perhaps they are providing some mounting points behind the motherboard.  You could make your own mounting clips and install them just about anywhere however, so what is your solution?

I did a recent rebuild in a Lain-Li case and used the HDD cage to mount an SSD, using an adapter.

In a custom build, as we see here with TOTB (Thinking Outside The Box), you can fabricate your own external mounting points for HDDs and such.

[cpurpe91]

Is that the 10,000 RPM driver with the black heatsink?

[BigAl01]

Yes, that's the Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM HDD and it's pretty fast.  It was the system drive on the previous build of TOTB, but now it's just a storage drive for games in the recent build of TOTB-2.