Building Your Own Graphics Workstation, Part Two
Page 6 of 6
 |
 |
Unfortunately, I did this the hard way by screwing in the drive and USB bay in before lining them up with the front face. I had to remove the front and reinstall the drives to get them to line up right. Don't be like me. I've suffered enough for us all. Since I bought a silver case, I wanted my drive faceplates to match the case color. Since I didn't bother to buy silver face drives, I removed the faces, masked out the areas where the LED lights shine through and the button holes, and I spraypainted them to match. Easy enough to do, though so is buying silver face drives.
Now here's an obvious question you might be wondering (other than "Why doesn't mom love me anymore?"): "Which drives do I get?"
Simple: Doesn't matter much. As far as floppy drives go, almost any brand will do, Sony, Teac, whatever, they're all the same, all between $12 and $15 or so. I picked mine up at a local computer fair for $9. Envy me! The DVD-ROM drive is not much of an issue either. You have the choice of buying retail or picking up a bare drive at a show or off the web for relatively cheap ($50 or so), but you might not get the DVD player software you'll need to watch DVDs on your system. I didn't care too much about that, so I got a $55 bare 16x Pioneer drive from the same computer fair where I got the floppy drive (and the clap). [an error occurred while processing this directive]
The only thing I suggest is to make sure you get a DVD drive that can read DVD-R discs (or perhaps DVD-R as well as DVD+R). If you ever plan on getting a DVD burner (which you should), you'll want a DVD-ROM drive that can read a disc burned with it. This Pioneer I have works great with home-burned DVD discs.
 |
Most CD-RW drives will burn a full CD in 2 to 3½ minutes, so the time difference is not staggering (compared to when it used to take 40 minutes to burn a CD). I've had good experiences with the TDK VeloCDs, LiteOn, and Yamaha burners. The one I picked out for this system is a Samsung SW-240 drive. Honestly, it is on the slower side (3 ½ minutes for a full CD), but it's a pretty quiet drive. Here we go with the damned noise. Welcome to "The Fall of the Home Office of Usher."
The Samsung comes with Adaptec Easy CD, but I just chucked it in favor of Nero Burning ROM 5.5, which burns a full 40-60 seconds faster than Easy CD (which takes almost 4 ½ minutes). That's an extra minute I could spend floating in my little rubber dingy at the bottom of a gin bottle or smashing up my friend's house with an axe handle.
Take the drives and locate the jumpers on the back that control the Master/Slave settings for the drive. Almost always this is a series of four or five pairs of pins located between the power connector and the IDE connector. Most, if not all current model drives will have either initials (Ma, Sl, CS) printed next to the appropriate pair of pins, or have a diagram on a label on top of the drive showing you which pins to short together with the included jumper. Set the CD-RW drive to Master and the DVD to Slave. You could set both drives to the CS (Cable Select) setting. This will automatically set the top connection on the cable to Master and the second connection to Slave. I prefer to set the drives manually, and so must you since I OWN YOU! Now, if you did not set these properly, when the computer boots it will not see either or both of the drives. If this happens to you, the first things to check are the Master/Slave settings and the drive connections. Then cry and ask God why he hates you so much.
 |
 |
The Chieftec case came with 12 drive rails that each mount to the sides of your 5¼" drives. This lets you slide in the drive from the front to lock it into place. Install the rails on your DVD and CD-RW drives and pop them into the second and third drive bays in the case (mine went in with the DVD above the CD-RW). We're leaving the top one open for the Digital Doctor 5. I suppose you can put your drives anywhere in your case, but again, you don't want the axe handles coming back round… Just make sure you mount the rail at the right location so that the drive face is flush with the case's front panel. Let's not talk about how I screwed this one up. Once you have the floppy/USB drive cage back in the tower, and the DVD/CD-RW drives in place, you'll need to hook up the power and data cables.
First, get the rounded floppy drive cable (or the flat ribbon cable -- the thinnest of the four ribbon cables supplied) and connect it to the back of your floppy drive. There should be only one way for the cable to attach to the floppy drive, but there's a good chance there isn't. The end that is closer to the middle connector on the cable goes to the drive; the far end goes to the motherboard.
Line up the red stripe on the ribbon part of the cable to pin 1 of the drive's connector. The drive should have a little "1" printed near the appropriate pin. More often than not, it is on the side closer to the power connector. If you experience an "FDD error" during boot, nine times out of 10 it's due to an improper orientation of the floppy cable. Some floppies come with a connector with a notch in the top, which forces the proper orientation, but a lot don't, so take note of the pin 1 position before you install the drive into its cage. Like I said, it's probably the side closer to the power connector.
 |
 |
 |
Next, grab the long 36" rounded drive cable, or one of the wider supplied ribbon cables; we'll use this longer cable to connect the DVD and CD-RW drives since they're all the way at the top of the case.
Luckily, with almost all hard drives and optical drives, there is a notch in the connector and a tab on the color-coded connectors of the cable that will only allow the proper orientation. Plug the black and gray ends of the cable to the optical drives (black to the Master drive), and route the blue end of the cable through the case to the motherboard below and connect them to the white IDE Connector (IDE 1). You could also connect it to the second (blue) IDE connector on the board; there's really no difference other than cable management.
Connect one end of the CD Audio cable to the audio connector on the back of the DVD player and thread it down the case to the motherboard. Unless you connect both CD-RW and DVD audio ports with two separate cables, you can only listen to an audio CD through the DVD drive; though playing MP3 files off of a CD will work on either drive regardless of audio connection. The DVD drive and CD-RW drive should both come with an audio cable, typically with a wide 4-pin to smaller 4-pin connector. The Soyo has both sized connectors to fit either cable type. How nice of them.
For drive power, connect two of the Molex power connectors from the power supply to the DVD and CD-RW drives. They only fit in one way, so no worries.
What's a graphics workstation without the graphics? A useless hunk of metal and silicon, and that's exactly what you've got right now. Well, I suppose you could use it to hold down a crazed wolf, or smash a Plexiglas window open in case of a fire. You could also use it as a flotation device. A bad one, but who's to judge here? Next time I figure we'll throw in the graphics and the drives and the rest of the garbage, flick the power and hope to whatever there is to hope to that we don't accidentally cause the atmosphere to ignite.
PART 3, THE FINALE
Dariush Derakhshani is 31. Nicely bald. Slowly going insane. Has a fear of commitment and of an early Protoss rush. Contributing author for "Maya: Secrets of the Pros" and Co-author for "Maya 4.5 Savvy." Animator. Teacher. A few awards and a couple degrees. Stout little man making reality at Sight Effects in Venice, CA. Flat feet. Can be found skulking about at www.painfulurination.com. You can reach him at koosh3d@earthlink.net.
Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
