My cousin has given me her old Packard Bell PC for a modest amount of money, I was initially going to use it for my NAS box project however when I looked inside I realised why I couldn't use it.
It has one spare 3.5 inch drive bay, and while I could remove the card reader, ideally I need it to take more than 3 hard drives. So I made the decision to strip the thing and then buy another case in a months time as hardware wise it was fast enough for what I had in mind.
I set about removing the hard drive, normally in itself a simple task - wrong they have put the thing is using four screws which normally isn't a challenge. Normally you'd remove the other side panel but on this you can't, its riveted on and also forms part of the top of the case so effectively one sheet of metal.
Now this isn't the only design flaw, try disconnecting the power connector for the motherboard, infact I dare you to disconnect it. It sits DIRECTLY under the hard drive, and unless you have very small fingers your bang out of luck - there was no way that connector is coming off, there just isn't enough room to get good leverage to get the connector off.
Now you'd think this would be the end of the matter, but no there still more. If you do manage to get the hard drive unscrewed (which I still haven't) then you will also have to remove the CPU cooler because it's so far forward on the motherboard that it obstructs where the drives goes in.
In light of this, I decided I was going to put it all back together, noticing it only had a 250 watt and wanting to add another hard drive that I had spare to make it more sell-able the 250 watt isn't man enough and I'm unable to fit a 300 watt which I have spare doing nothing because there is no way of getting that power connector off the motherboard.
So whoever designed this case, needs shooting, picture to follow later.


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