Antec ISK110 almost complete

I decided to postpone any more updates until I got hold of an HDD to put in it. Here I have installed a borrowed 320GB WD Scorpio Black into the system.

A subassembly attaches to the side of the chassis that is underneath the motherboard. This comes with two stick-on strips of a phenolic type of material for the crossbars to insulate the HDD/s from shorting out when they are mounted. You can just see the red coloured material (a strip of which is also mounted under the power supply board where it attaches to the chassis, which is on the right) through a couple of the holes of the lower crossbar due to slight misalignment. As you can see the subassembly and power cabling provide for up to two 2.5” laptop type HDDs to be mounted. The SATA cable I used is the one that comes with the motherboard – being usefully short.

From the front we can see it going and running Windows 7 which this HDD already had on it and which happened to have the right boot drivers in the CriticalDriverDatabase, which being a standard school image was a lot of different ones. The cable layout is the best I can do with this chassis. The black cables uppermost are the front panel USB and audio connectors and should stay in place without getting caught in the fan as they are quite stiff. I have used some cable ties on the power loom at lower and the front panel jumper cables to sort of tie them all together reasonably tidily. When the lid goes on it will simply press this loom down in place without pushing it towards the fan. Note the redundant extra 4 pins of the CPU power connector to the left, the redundant Molex power connector to the right, and the redundant PCI expansion slot far left which has come in handy to help route the SATA cable. This is one of the cables that came with the motherboard – they are usefully shorter than anything else I could find – in this chassis, short is better than long. As I suggested before, the best enhancement I think Antec could make to this chassis would be to put some tie-on loops into the edges to help keep cables in place.

Next time I will probably have the covers on and be installing and configuring Windows 7. And after that it will be entertaining or useful to compare the tiny PC to a number of other similar form factors that are out there today.