Installing a new hard drive in a Raven 2: Painful.

I recently bought a Raven 2 system, which I'm otherwise happy with as far as I can tell (it's only been a day); unfortunately it took me a good 2 hours to install the hard drive from my old machine into it. I'm far from a hardware guru, but I've installed hard drives, graphics cards, CPUs, RAM and power supplies before, so I figure this shouldn't be beyond my abilities.

What follows is an account of the steps I went through. In the end it felt like I had just been through a puzzle hunt, and while proud of my accomplishment I would not wish this on anyone.

The steps:

1. Locate the existing hard drive: no problem. Now, it's held in place not just by screws, but by screws that go through some sort of rubber thing; maybe that's to help it survive impacts of the whole computer, or earthquakes or something, but it makes it pretty well impossible to actually line up the hard drive's screw hole with the screw itself.

2. Figure out that the regular sort of hard drive screw won't work, and you need a special kind of screw (provided); it was difficult to tell what screws were used for the existing hard drive, since they were surrounded by rubber.

3. Open both sides of the case; undo thumbscrews to release the hard drive enclosure. The hard drive enclosure can't actually move very far once you've released it, because it's boxed in by the motherboard (removing that was a bridge further than I was willing to go). With some wiggling you can get it far enough out to manually screw in the (non-thumb) screws. There's enough room for a small screwdriver on one side, but on the other you'll be screwing them in by hand in a cramped space, gripping them between your pointer and middle fingers. Bear in mind that it's extremely difficult to line up the screws and the holes because of the big rubber thing between and the general difficulty of seeing what's going on.

4. Put everything back where you found it. Look for power and data cables. There's a data cable hiding near the one for the existing hard drive; there a power plug attached to the power plug for the other hard drive too, but the cord going to the power supply is a couple of inches too short.

5. Give up on existing power cables; figure out which two cables you need to hook together to get power to your hard drive (this took a while, since it seemed like there was probably *some* wire I could hook them to; turns out I just needed to go straight to the power supply). By blind touch, find an empty space on the power supply and plug everything in.

6. Seal it all up. Thank goodness you don't have to change jumper cables or connect hard drives in a particular order so that you can boot from the right one anymore.


The particular aspects that made this more difficult than it needed to be:
- The unnecessarily fancy screw+rubber system
- The inability of the hard drive enclosure to move
- The lack of extra disk drive power outlets

On the other hand, installing a hard drive in the last Digital Storm system I bought was a breeze. It may just be this case, but regardless it bears checking into.

Yea i was considering the raven 2 and ablahblah told me about how hard it is to change stuff around and how stupid it's layout is.