Everything has arrived and conveniently organized itself on my bed to pose for a photo opportunity!
All of the products shown here are listed in the original post. I would like to add that a lot of reviews of the Thermaltake XRound SATA cables on newegg say they are flimsy. Having inspected all five of them, they are far from flimsy, for what it's worth. The morons probably pulled them out by the wire, which can destroy any plug or cable...
In addition, newegg sent me a "small/free gift under $10". It turned out to be a free t-shirt with a footprint on it, which had the pattern of the AMD logo and the newegg logo, and a newegg hat. The hat is actually very nice, except that it has a leather strap on the back. Even a plastic one would be better... Leather straps and a brass fastener are just lame and I won't wear it, even being a nerd! I did wear the t-shirt the other day, though. I know I whored myself out in doing so, but I don't mind giving either newegg or AMD publicity, and I'm a poor (especially after these upgrades!) college student, so free stuff is always welcome!
The first item I will feature is the Silverstone CFP51-B drive bay converter:
It truly is good-looking, and performs well. It keeps my 4 Raptors under 40 degrees C when ambient temperatures are near 30 degrees C! I will be upgrading its fan, too, so I expect those temperatures to drop even more!
It is completely aluminum as the box states, even the mesh is!
I regret I didn't take a picture to show how this bay converter actually isolates the 4 HDD bays from the case support structure. It's quite ingenious! When I go to change the fan in it, I will definitely get a picture of it. This product is well worth the money!
Next up is the mysterious Scythe Kama Meter. I say mysterious because not only is it difficult to find any specs on this bad boy online, but it isn't very popular for something as sleek-looking as this.
Reading the box is almost as confusing as reading the manual; the manual sucks, so I had to figure everything out on my own. It turns out the knobs are detachable simply by pulling them off (for when you want to change the front panel), and the lower left knob is to be pushed in to change the vibrant display color.
The construction of the fan controller is very clean and organized.
Even the fan wiring is glued together to make cable management easier. Luckily the Armor has many places to hide cables so I don't have to worry about it regardless, but it is a nice feature. As I mentioned in the original post, despite its quality construction, it isn't nearly as powerful as my old GateWatch from AeroCool, but it gets the job done.
The packaging for the Raptors by newegg was top notch! That box could have been thrown with the 2" of bubble wrap around the thing. I think there was more table than bubble wrap, too!
All 4 of them work excellently! It was very easy to set up the RAID 0 data array with the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. The hot swapping also came in handy so that it was easier to install the OS on the 4th HDD. I have 1 OS HDD, and the other 3 devoted to the data RAID 0 array. As mentioned before, I get average reads of 140 MB/s, and a burst speed of 250 MB/s. My average seek time is only 7ms, too!
This image shows the order in which I am installing the rubber vibration dampener and the fan filter:
The order is obviously straight forward, but I was surprised how well the vibration dampener actually worked. The iCage fan was quiet before, but now I can barely hear it even with my ear right up next to the intake! I intend to do the same thing with the Silverstone drive bay converter, and have since purchased longer screws as the fan filters would not fit on the 1" screws provided for each setup. When I get the new fans, I will install them with the new screws. I bought the normal, silver screws, as well as some drywall ones as those are black (to prevent corrosion?), so it should match better with the case if the silver screws show too much in either case with the black fan filter as a contrasting color.
This is the front of the case, finally completed and working properly.
This image is with the red LED mod in action, or you would not be able to see the two LEDs very well. The temperature displayed is that of the 4 raptors in the Silverstone bay converter, and the fan speed displayed is for the one behind the HSF for the CPU in my case.
I was actually able to arrange it so all the case fans, the CPU fan, the floppy drive, and DVD-RW drive were all run off of one molex chain from the PSU, which helped a great deal with cable management, as you will see in the following photos:
My case looks pretty snazzy with the side door on. As mentioned in the original post, the blue LEDs ruined the effect of the red LEDs, so I have since ordered clear cabling that is UV blue to replace the stuff you see here (it arrived today, actually).
This is my case without the side panel. The wiring is obviously very clean, and this is without a modular PSU!
But FlaKing apparently thinks I have something to hide, so I also took a picture with a flash so you can see all the cabling:
These photos were taken before I sleeved the power switch panel. As you will notice, the air flow is all but unobstructed, and I accomplished my goal of having two separate air channels! However, I would like to add a metal divider between the two, so if any of you more accomplished case modders has suggestions as to how to go about this with sheet metal or some other product, let me know!
More photos will come as I sleeve more items, and install the new UV cables.