The specs on the physical dimensions of a hard drive and DVD drive are deceptive.  Hard Drives are actually 4″ wide, but the spec calls it a 3.5″ form factor.  The DVD drives are actually 5.71″ wide, but the spec calls it a 5.25″ form factor.  Go figure.  It really doesn’t matter since the computer case gets it right.

What it does say is that hard drives are not as wide as DVD drives, which means there has to be two cage sections in the case one with a small width for the hard drives, and a larger width cage for your DVD drives.

The problem with installing drives is that there are several different methods of installing drives in the computer case depending on the manufacturer and the size of the computer case.

Some basics, if you look at your hard drive, you’ll see 3 screw holes along each side.  Most of the mounting methods consists of screwing screws in these holes through holes in the case, which holds the drive.  Some cases have pull out cages that make drive installation relatively easy.  You install the drive in the pull out cage and then slide the cage into a slot in the computer case.  I recommend you check out the installation booklet that comes with the case to see the recommended method of installing hard drives in that particular case.  Each case is different.  The screws you got with the computer case are the screws you will use to install the hard drive.

DVD drives install slightly differently.  The front of the DVD drive has to go through the front of the computer case so you can load the DVD.  To do this install, some cases require you remove the front panel of the case, which is usually held on with plastic latches.  You’ll have to remove a plate in the front of the case for the DVD drive to come out the front.  You don’t have to do that with hard drives, since they are entirely internal. Because of this, there are different methods of installing DVD drives.   Some DVD drives require you screw in slider rails that you can move the DVD drive back and forth to align it with the front of the case.  Some slide in from the front and are locked in place by a sliding brake mechanism.  Others have the same screws in the side as with the hard drives.  Again check your installation guide that comes with the case for you case particulars.

Let’s talk about the connectors on the back of the drives.   If you purchased SATA drives, your all set.  Just install the drives in the case with the interface connectors on the back of the drives facing the motherboard so we can hook up cables.

If you did not, that means your hard drives and DVD drives use an IDE interface.  If you have IDE drives, you have to be aware of the jumper on the back.  This is a 6-pin connector on the back consisting of two rows of three pins.  There is a jumper over two of the pins.  If you have more that one DVD drive one of the jumper should be connecting the “Master” pins on the connector panel, and on the other DVD drive, you’ll have to move the jumper to the “Slave” pins.  If you have only one drive, the pins should cover the “Master” pins.  The pins are usually labled, if not check your drive installation manual.  The same goes for the hard drive.  The good news is with SATA drives, you don’t have to worry about that anymore and you shouldn’t see any jumpers at all.

Jumper to select Master and Slave Drives

Install your drives, will do the cable hook ups in another post.

The graphics card is a fairly easy install.  Graphics card fit into the PCI Express X16 slot.  Huh?  Well, if you don’t know what one of them is, and there might be two on your motherboard, don’t worry about it.  The graphics card will only fit into one or two slots on your motherboard, the longest ones, and they are keyed so you can fit them into any other slots.

Graphics Card

Before you hunker on down.  Let’s take this a step at a time.  Graphics cards usually come wrapped in an anti-static bag and are susceptible to static, so ground yourself to the computer case before you start and handle the board by the edges.  Take the card out of the packaging and anti-static bag.  There should be an instruction booklet and DVD disk.  Put them aside for now.

Look at the motherboard in the case, you’ll see the slots the graphics card can be plugged into, but before you can do that, you’ll have to remove a panel in the bag of the case so that the outout ports on the back of the graphics card will come out the back of the computer.  That way you don’t have to open the case to hook up your computer monitor.

There are two ways to remove the back case panel and mount the graphics card.  One is to unscrew the panel screw, slide the plate out, mount the graphics card on the motherboard, and screw the motherboard down by replacing the panel screw and catching the metal outcropping on the  graphics card with the screw to lock down the graphics card.

The other is to lift a handle that lifts up and is hinged on one side, like a door.  You can then slide the back case plate out, put the graphics card in,. and close the hinged handle, which also catches the graphics card outcropping to secure it in place.

If there are any other cables supplied with the graphics card, look at the instruction manual to see how their hooked up.

If you have purchased two graphics cards, install the second like the first one, and you’ll need to install a cable connecting the two graphics card together which comes with the graphics card.

That’s it, your done with the graphics card for the moment.

For me, the hardest thing to do in building a computer is hooking up the computer case wiring.  You are handling very small plugs and pins.  Most of the time, you can’t get to the plugs, because other wires and boards are in your way.

You might be asking why are you hooking up wires when you don’t even have the power supply in the case yet.  Well, there’s a method to my madness.   These wires are difficult to get in place, I like to put them in before any other wires get in the way to make the job a lot easier.  So we’ll start with the computer case wiring.

What are all those wires attached to the case?  Most of you have seen the front lights on the computer when the disk drive is accessed.  You’ve turned the front power switch on and off, and you’ve hit the reset button when your software hangs up.  Well all that is controlled by the motherboard, the lights and switches on the front of the case are hooked to the motherboard through these wires.  If you have any USB or Firewire ports on the front of the case they’ll have to be hooked up also.

Let’s get started.  Get out your motherboard user’s guide that came with your motherboard.  Look for the diagram of the motherboard.  What your looking for is where the ports are on the motherboard.  Keep this page open as we proceed so you will know where plugs and cables are connected to the motherboard.  Most User’s Guides also show the connector pins in a diagrams so you know which pins are for what.

Look for a block of pins usually called “panel,” or “front panel connector.”  The power on/off switch plug and the reset swith on/off plug usually are two-pin plugs.  They should slide over their respective pins which should be labeled “PWRSW” and “RESET.”  You’ll find a four pin plug which is your system warning speaker for beeps and warning signals when something is wrong, slide that over the four “SPKR” pins.

Computer Case Wires

We have two lights on the front panel.  One lets you know there is power to the system, the power on light, and the other is when the disk drive is accessed.  Each are two pin plugs.  The system power is usually labeled, “PLED,” and the disk drive light is usually called, “IDE_LED.”  After you slide all these small pins over the posts on the motherboard, the hardest wiring is taken care of.

Most of the current cases, have a USB port on the front panel.  These USB port(s) are different from the USB ports in the back of the computer.  The ones on the back are already hooked up directly to the motherboard.  So we’re hooking up the front USB ports.  Look for a connector on the motherboard labeled “USB58″ or “USB76″ or just plain, “USB.”  The plug from the front panel should be labeled, “USB.”  This is a 10-pin plug with one pin plugged up so there is only one way to install this on the motherboard.

The next cable is the audio cable, usually labeled “HD AUDIO,” or “AUDIO.”   There may be another plug on this wire labeled, “AC97.”  Ignore this, and use the “HD Audio” plug if you have digital audio on your motherboard.  If you  don’t the motherboard diagram will give you the AC97 port.  The HD Audio plug is a 10-pin plug with a different pin blocked than the USB plug had.  On the motherboard diagram is usually called “Front Panel Audio connector.”  This connector usually just looks like 9 pins sticking up in the air.

Audio Cable

The last front panel cable you may or may not have.  This is for your 1394 “Firewire” port, and this depends if you have a Firewire port on the front of the case or not.  The plug is usually labeled “1394″ and the motherboard diagram is usually called an “IEEE 1394a connector, or simply, “Firewire header.”

That should be it for the computer case front panel cabling, except there’s still a wire, or maybe two, floating in the case.  These are for the case fans.  Most motherboard have a couple of connectors for fans called “Fan header,” or “Pwr Fan2″, “Pwr Fan2,” etc.  These are three-pin connectors.  Hook up your case fans.

You should now have all the loose wires in your case hooked up to the motherboard, congratulations.

This one should be relatively easy.  There are two types of data cables for connection to storage devices, such as: solid state drives, hard drives, and DVD drives.

The first is the old version which is called IDE or EIDE, or ATA.  This is a 16 bit wide bus that transfers data from anywhere between 16 Mb per second to 133 Mb per second depending on which version your using.  Each IDE connector on the motherboard can hook to two IDE storage devices, a master and a slave.  Remember when we installed the DVD drives, we put a jumper wire over two of six pins to designate master or slave drive.  IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics, just a little tidbit.

IDE cable

IDE cables look like flat ribbons 2″ wide with three connectors attached to the ribbon.  The cable is normally 18″ long, but you can get round cables that go up to 36″.  Round cables are nice, because they do not get in the way of other cables in the case, are more flexible, and do not redirect or impede air flow.

The three connectors on the IDE cable are spaced two close together and one at the othe end of the ribbon.  The stand-alone connector at the end goes to your motherboard.  The other two cables go to the master and slave drive.  There are 40 holes in the connector consisting of 2 rows of 20 holes.  One of the holes in the middle is blocked to let you know which way to insert the cable into the socket.  So do it.  Put the cable in the motherboard and the other end in your DVD drive.  If you do not have a 2 rows of 20 pins to put the cable into, then you probably have a SATA drive.  Read on.

SATA data cable

Starting in 2007 a new horse rode into town for both power and data cables, called serial ATA, or SATA.  This is gradually replacing all the IDE ribbon cables, as you can get SATA DVD drives now.  SATA cables transfer data anywhere from 1.3 Gb per second (first generation) to 3.0 Gb per second (second generation) to 6.0 Gb per second (thrid generation), with the most common SATA hard disk drives transferring at 3.0 GB per second, at present.  Almost 22 times faster than an IDE cable, you can see why they are replacing the old technology.

SATA cables are much smaller than the IDE cable, although they are a little stiff.  The data connectors have only 7 pins with an L like notch on one end, so the connector will only go into the interface one way.  There is a slightly different SATA power connector which will talk about when we get to power cables.

SATA connector showing notch

Let’s hook up the data cables.  There should be one SATA cable per drive to one socket in the motherboard.  Go back to your motherboard diagram and look for your SATA connectors.  They should be labeled SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, etc.  Your main drive, the one with the operating system should be connected to SATA1 and so on.  Go for it.

You should now have the data cables to all your drives attached to your motherboard.  Now that wasn’t so bad.  Now all we have to do is get power to the system, something we haven’t written about yet and the topic of our next post.

The power supply seems like an easy install, but get ready for spaghetti.  Now that you have your drive data cables connected, your fans connected, and your case wires connected to your motherboard, your computer inside may seem like a jumble of wires, but you haven’t seen anything yet.  We’ve saved the power supply until the end because the amount of cabling is about to double.

When you consider that each DVD drive, your hard drive, maybe your graphics card,  and the motherboard requires power and that power has to arrive at the device needing power via a power cable, then all of a sudden you’ve got twice as many cables running all over the inside of the case.  But there is a method to the madness, so let’s get started.

Power Cables

Unwrap your power supply from its packaging, and take it out of the wrapping material.  If you didn’t get a modular power supply you’ll see a bunch of cables coming out the back of the power supply.

Modular Power Supply

If you got a modular power supply, you won’t see as many cables coming out the back, but you’ll still see some.  You’ll also see ports on the back for the modular power cables.  I like modular power supplies because it reduces the number of non-useful cables in your computer.  You only use the cables you need.   If you have a modular power supply, make sure the extra cables snap into the power supply ports with a click so it won’t come out inadvertently later when using the computer.

Let’s install the power supply in the case.  The power supply fits into its own notch in the case.  Fit the power supply into the case so the on-off switch comes out the back of the case, and the power supply fan is pointed toward the open air on the inside of the case.  Do not block the fan by having the fan pointed at the case side.  Also make sure none of your previouse wires are trapped by the power supply.

The power supply is held to the case with four Phillips screws attached from outside the case.  Make the screws tight, but not super tight.  The cables should come out the back of the power supply inside the case.

There should be at least three cables coming out the back.  One is a big wide 24-pin ATX connector that is the main power to your motherboard.  You should easily find where that goes on the motherboard.  It has a latch on the side that matches with a hook on the plug so you put the plug in the correct direction.

There should be at least one 8-pin ATX 12v and one 6-pin PCI express coming out the back of the power supply.  One of these will go into the second power connector on your motherboard.  This may be a 8, 6, or 4-pin socket, and usually the 8-pin power plug can be broken in half to make two fours.  Check your motherboard, or your motherboard diagram to find this connector.

Your graphics card may take a 6-pin power cable.  Some graphics need additional power and some don’t.  Look for a power connector plug on the graphics card, if you don’t see one, the motherboard will power the card.

Molex Connector

Each drive needs power.  The IDE drives use a 4-pin Molex connector.  The Molex connector is rounded on two edges to match the connector which is also rounded on two corners, so you can’t put it in the wrong direction.

SATA Power Connector

The last power connectors you will need is the SATA power connector.  This is a 15-pin slim connector with an L-shaped appendage on the end, like the data cable had, so you can’t hook it up the wrong way.  Make sure they’re pushed in tight to the disk drive.  You’ll need one power connector per drive, one power cable usually has two connectors.

Congratulations!  You’ve installed all your hardware inside your case.  Before we put the covers on the case we’ll will want to test things out, which we’ll write about next.