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Any Cases With Front-Facing Expansion Slots?
owenferguson asks: "I'm sick and bloody tired of futzing around with ports (USB, sound, video, firewire, serial) that come out of the back of my mid-tower case. Does anyone know of a case that allows you to mount the motherboard 'backwards,' that is, with the expansion slots and various ports situated beneath the drive bays, facing foreward? I'm planning to build one myself, but if there's one already on the market, I'll probably just buy it."
BTW, does anyone know of a case that allows you to mount cd drives, floppy drives etc on the back of the machine?
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Depending on how many free drive bays you have, there are certainly drive bay mounting panels to present most of the common things you'd want to plug and unplug regularly - audio, USB, 1394 and serial.
An external one (intended for laptops, but what the heck) is made by Mobility Electronics. There was an internal one featured on Scan's Today Only page the other day, with temperature monitoring and all sorts - I'm pretty sure it was made by ASUS, although I can't find it on their site.
I've seen several cases with front panels like this, too. Even my gf's cruddy e-machines PC does that. Coolmaster case with front USB (and optional 1394 IIRC).
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Just buy some extension cables approx 50cm you will need high quality cables for Firewire / USB / LAN and Video if running at a high res. This will also releve "wear and tear" on the ports.
These guys were mentioned in a previous AskSlashdot article. Looks kinda neat, doesn't it?
Another simpler option (USB only) can be found at Antec's site.
CyberGuys carries this, which will take up a drive bay and an expansion slot, but gives you front-panel connections for FireWire, game, headphone out, speaker out, microphone, and two USB connectors, plus volume control. Seems kinda like a kludgey solution to me, but it will do what you're looking for.
~Philly
My solution?
I got a six foot folding table (they make larger ones if you need it), put it in the middle of the room, and put my computers underneath it. That way, if I need to change connections, etc - I just go around to the back and fiddle with them. No more dragging machines out, etc.
To get power to the machines, I ran an extension cord along the ceiling, then down to the desk, and wrapped it with split loom tubing. Same for network connections, etc. You can also run the cords along the floor, and use those rubber floor cover thingies. Ideally, you would have a raised floor - I might do that next time.
So far, it has worked great for me, much better than the desk I had!
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It would be worth $20 to $30 to not need to get out the dremel and make my own rear facing drive bay.
The other choice is externally mounting the CD-Writer. That makes the whole system more fragile. More of a pain to move and to work on. It's hard to run IDE cables externally, possible, but hard. SCSI CDWriters are either slower, more expensive or both. USB 1.1 is slower. Firewire and USB 2.0 are more expensive. Check pricewatch.com, $71 for 24x10x40x IDE, USB 1.1 is limited to 4X4X6X ($85), firewire starts at $144.