Papa Smurf

Hello I'm near to buy a W100 but I need more  HDD cages and I glad to know if it's possible to buy more spare pieces in Europe (Spain).
 
The case is awesome but  I need this pieces.
 
Thanks in advance for the answers.
 
 

What is really cool a bout the W100 is that you get to put most of it together yourself. It gives you the oportunity to see what works and what doesn't or how can I make it better. So I put the case together using the manual. While assembling the case the first thing I really had a problem accepting was the casters that Thermaltake supplied.
 
The problem I had with those caster was two fold.  First of all just seeing them in the bag of parts, I knew would be a joke to put on anything I own. Here you got this really cool, big industrial size, awsome case and couldn't imagine putting a cheap, substandard caster on it. I have had many products in the past with basically  the same design casters. Typically seen on various inexpensive office chairs, and other light constuction particle board cabinets or small filedrawers. All of which wound up in the trash often due to those cheap type caster. I have seen the wheels separate, I have had the plastic wheel break, they don't roll very smooth espescially when you put a bit of weight on them. They don't even use ball bearings.
So I already had a negative attitude about the casters before I even put them on.
 
OK I put them on anyway just to look at how stable or unstable will this case be?  For me it made the case too low to the ground as far as using any of the lower ventalalation built into the bottom plate. Refering to dust and pulling or pushing any air that close to the floor alway means major dust issues. Then just general stability for me was a big thumbs down with those caster. On a solid smooth floor or not really gonna move it around much, maybe OK. I have a carpeted floor. One issue with carpeted floor and those casters is the debris and fibers off the floor get wrapped around the caster's axels making it hard to roll around.
 
Lets take a quick look at the case and see how it relates to weight transfer. The inside of the case is basicaly devided into two sections. The side with the window being the deepest with a vertical wall about two thirds the depth  for Power Supply on the bottom and mainboard, video cards and watercooling res, pump, water, etc putting it's weight about centerline of the case. Looking at options here, say you mount your drives either to the front rails of the case puts weight again kinde of over the centerline but when stacking drive you lose any low center of gravity, which means easier to dump over.  If you choose to use the extra mounting rails and keep drives the facing the window you start shifting the center of gravity to the windowed side. The last option is to mount yor drive on the backside of the vertical wall thus moving your center of gravity to the door behind the main board. Or even if you use that side for radiators, water, and fans will still put weight to that side of the case.
 
So what happens when your case has most of it's weight on eitherside with these casters, say on a carpeted floor. One thing to add is the fact that these casters piviot  on an offset depending on which way you roll the case. So for example, you have drives mounted to the backside of the vertical wall. With that kind of weight and say you roll the case in that same direction, the casters piviot in toward the center of the case. The case will not be very stable and can easily fall over or be pushed over to crash on its side. Can you imagine watching your new build or project falling over not to mention the damage to your expensive hardware. That's not what's going to happen to my build.
 
So I pulled the casters off and through them out. That way insured  that I would never use them, and forced me to resolve this problem.
 
I took a trip over to my local Home Depot for a solution, as they have a good selection of heavy duty casters to choose from.
Here are the casters I chose:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-3-in-Polyurethane-Swivel-Caster-with-Brake/203672194
Everbilt  Model # 4120545EB  Store SKU # 194726    cost $8.98 ea.
3" Polyurethane Swivel Caster with Brake
 

 
Bear in mind they don't come looking like this. They come in bare metal but wheels are red and black.
All ball bearing with 175lbs load capacity
What is really cool about this caster is the locking brake mechanism.  When actuated, it not only locks the wheel from turning but it locks the caster in any position you want it to face. Why is this so cool? If I want to make my case virtually imposable to fall or even be pushed over I lock all the wheels facing away from the case giving it a very wide base. See photos:
 

 
It will be a bit of a challange to mount these to the bottom of your case.
I had cut out adheasive backed density foam rubber pads to use between the case and caster to reduce noise and vibration. I recall cutting out a small portion of aluminium supports that were pop rivited to the bottom panel in order to place the mounting bolts through the caster plate and bottom panel. I used wide flat washers to aide in support to keep the bottom panel from flexing and was able to keep enough clearance around the fan vents to still mount fans if I ever want and the magnetic air filter still lays on the bottom.
 
 

OK Wheel issue resolved, I would like to mow address my changes and enhancements on the Drive Bays.
 
Thermaltake give you good flexability  with three general mounting configurations where if needed can be mixed in any combo you like.
Before I get into this, in my drive configurations, for my needs I use only SATA Drives, I don't use RAID in this build, just plain SATA I, II, & III. Some 2.5 SSDs and 3.5 HDDs. One of Thermaltake's tripple option lets you mount drives to the backside of the center pannel, which is behind the motherboard, with mounting hardware. I wont be using this option in my build, which I will explain in a later post.
 
The second & third mounting option's involves using the 5.25 rack spacing. In both of these options the drives can be mounted in a vertical stacking pattern. I will refer to the second option, which I also chose not to use, as the internal rackmount system,  because all the drives will be inside the case, behind the windowed side door, to the right of the motherboard, by two aluminium vertical rails that kind of mimics the vertical mounting thru the front panel. The reasons I chose not to use this option were;
A.) the two supplied rails would have to bear all the weight of six to eight 3.5 HDDs all 100% off center oof the rails, just didn't feel it would be rigid enough, especially if I was going to make it all "Hot Swapable".
B.) you would also have to open the side windowed door to access them
C.) I will need this area to mount two 240mm resevoirs for my watercooling loops.
 
Call me "Old School" but I like the traditional style of having all my drives to have access through the front of my cases. I will refer to this as option three.
I will arrainge my drive bays, in sequence from top down, starting in the top 5.25 slot with my ASUS Rampage V Extreme O.C. Panel display mounting frame. Followed by the 5.25 Thermaltake Power & I/O panel. I want the ASUS panel on top for two main reasons;
A.) there will be NO cables hanging over the display from the Thermaltake panel, like USB cables, or Headset cables, etc.
B.) so i can pull the ASUS O.C. Remote controller out through the front to access the O.C. controlls and lay or stand the device on the top of the case.
The third slot or maybe at the very bottom I will mount my 5.25 Blu Ray drive.
In between I mounted the three dual drive carrier brackets supplied with the kit.
This leaves a void in the front panel where there is room for a fourth dual drive carrier bracket.  I have no idea  why Thermaltake didn't include a fourth in this kit?
I have heard a few people whith this same concern and if they should start adding the fourth in this kit, they should either charge more or give a free one to those who bought a first release who didn't get it. If they don't add it, it would be very nice for them to make it available at a reasonable price in spare parts. I truely believe good spare parts supplies need to be available to case owners. I have called Customer Support and have been told that this item should be available soon so I planed for it in my design.
 
OK now this is what really disapointed me the most, and I do shame Thermaltake on there utter lack of foresite in developing this case.
Can someone please explain why would someone want a removeable slide-in drive carrier that is NOT Hot Swappable?
This just utterly mistifies my me of what I concider pure ignorance. What gaul to give customers a nice slide-in 3.5/2.5 drive carrier even designed so that either style drive has their SATA connectors in the same symetricle position, "Hot Swap Ready", with absolutly NO SATA Backplane? It's like they were gonna give us that as they were half way there, then someone dropped the ball. I love my W100 but for this issue alone, I am not sure I would recomend it to my worst enemies. If a company relleay wants to pride themselves as an industry leader and inovator in designs and claims a Core series case as their Flagship model, I will have to shake my head in discust.
 
What is so stupid is that if you want to change a drive on a slide-in configuration, is that you have to get to the back of it to change two SATA connectors. This defeats the whole purpose folks, and I challange any audiance who dissagrees. So what do we do as consummers? Well I guess some people have to now live with this fact, the few mundain folks who I guess just don't care. Or in my case, rise to the challange and making ultimate mods, by fabricating my own backplane bolt on upgrade, making my system maybe one of the first if not the only "Hot Swappable Core W100". I engineered and fabricated a very durable, ridged, steel frame that bolts onto the dual drive carrier bracket and a complete SATA connectorized backplane. I have not decided to add my photos of it yet but it does work extremely well.
 
Oh one more thing on this topic of W100 dual drive carrier brackets is that in it's current design you can't plug in angled down SATA connector cables on the lower drive as they interfere with the lower rear lip of the dual drive carrier bracket, and you will need to notch the brackets if you want to use these types of cables. I like them for wire management purposes as the flat cables can be stacked in layers from the angle down connectors quite neatly.
 
note:   I am adding this comment after completing this build and using my "Hot Swap" setup.
The backplane adapters and brackets have been working flawlessly.  All of my various SDD's, HDD's both 3.5" and 2.5" drives mounted on the plastic Thermaltake drive carriers make perfect, consistant, insertion and contact to my SATA Backplane Adapters. By my photos it may look  a bit crude, but I needed to have a  rigid bracket that would not flex or bend, and would stay in perfect allignment to the Thermaltake dual drive carrier brackets.
 
I used the locknuts you see in the photos to allow the Backplane Adapters to float just fractions of an inch so they would align themselves to the drive's SATA connectors when the drive is locked into it's slot. I made the holes that the Backplane Adapters mount just a bit oversized in my brackets to give it the slop I needed and when I tightened the locknuts I took them down to where I couldn't jiggle the adapters and the backed the nut ou just enough that the adapters would move freely without binding.
 
I could have found a SATA Drive Hot Swap system that would mount into the W100 but I wanted to keep the cost of the build down so the Backplane Adapters I found by first Googling images took me to eBay and Amazon I found the adapters that I wanted to use. I found the manufacture and produt number, then called them directly so I could verify specifications. My source is PACTECH www.pactech-inc.com  tech@PACTECH-INC,com You need to call or email  them because the product is not in their online catalog. The part number is: RH-SATA-25D and cost was around $6-$8 each.  I bought about a dozen of them incase I messed some up in the process and to have backup supply and for some expansion should Thermaltake make available the dual drive carrier bracket assemblies.
 
I also wanted to put insulation on the Backplne Adaptors on the side that contacted my metal brackets because the circuit boards had traces that ran close to the mounting holes for LEDs. I had some thin teflon sheets with adhesive backs that I cut into strips the width of the adapter and punched holes in them with a paper punch for the mounting screws and stuck them down to the adapters. This also helped to alow the adapter to float without binding. (see phots below)
 
I made the brackets from 1/8" x 1/2" flat stock rods and hardware from Home Depot. The brackets are mounted in place with 5 minute epoxy and are aligned using 2 SATA drives plugged into the adaptors. Hope this info can help anyone who wants to do this.
 
OK that's all folks, and sorry about all my complaining, but someone's gotta do it. LOL
My next concerns is the snap on or hinged skins of the W100.

Anyone finding Issues or Making Improvements on the Core W100 & W200 Cases?
Please Post Your Comments Here for Discussion
 
I bought a Core W100 a couple months ago and found much room for improvement
I will post a series of issues I had and how I resolved them.
Please feel free to comment and post your concerns or how you improved or resolved your issues.
 
 
About Me:
I am kinda new on this forum but I have a lot of background in Mechanical,  Electro Mechanical, Manufacturing Engineering.
I have worked in Hardware Engineering, Product Developement, R&D Labs, Fabrication Labs & Model Shop.
I have been building custom to order PCs, Servers, & Workstations since 1985
I don't claim to know everything 

I ran into the exactly this. The top left bar was not correct rotated. So I had just luck, I could bend the case a little bit to remove and insert the bar correctly.
In the first picture in the manual there was no info about the correct rotation and if I remember correctly no screw holes visible. Only pages later where you put the screws for the doors/top panel...
 
Also a important information which is missing in the manual: if somebody want to mount the hard disks behind the motherborard, please add the HDD mounts before you insert the PS and Motherborard. Otherwise you can't screw it.

First thing I did was to through away the User Manual..  haha just kidding.. If you are new to this, you need to pay extreemly close attention to what the manual shows as there are no written instructions, just  as what LSDeep said about having problems with the screws, I had  no problems. However you have to know things about mechanical assembly and how to be skilled at navigating through common manufacturing issues. These skills come with experiance and I will say that having people, friends, coworkers that share tips, tricks, and in this case, mechanical / electro-mechanical skills with whoever is new to assembling computer cases from a kit, to building custom cable harnesses, as well as to lay out and plumb an efficiant water cooling system. Oh I made a pun "in this case". I always use a screwdriver that locks into the phillips head so I don't slip off the screw. (There are actually 2 basic cuts to types of phillips screws) I go through my bits until I find one that locks good to the screw and holds it, That said I always just start all the screws on a pannel and then run them down. If I feel any resistance, I back it out a couple turns and run it back in. Often this happens due to paint in the threads on the pannel and when you back the screw out you pull the paint out of the thread. Don't have to torque these screws too tight. Usually once the scew is lightly hand tight I will add about another quarter  to half turn and not strip the threads.
Another tip is to absolutly make sure that the four long frame bars are in the correct orientation as the drawing shows. Look att all the holes, not just the ones that the screws go in. All those hole need to be in the right directions when you mount the front and back pannel. This will save you time and not have to dissassemble your work when you find that you messed up.
I just got a w100 for a new build and love it. You will hear negative comments from me but they are constructive critisism. I always find ways to enhance any case cause that's what I do "MOD"..