How to Remove The Hard Drive Cage From A CM Storm Scout 2 For Water Cooling And Air Flow

[DirtyGamer]

This is a tutorial on how to remove the Hard Drive cage in the Cooler master Storm 2 Case. Why would you want to remove it?

1. The storm 2 does not have a good place to mount a 120 radiator, removing the cage allows you to easily mount a radiator with the front intake fans.

2. Removing the cage allows more airflow from the intake fans as well as reduces turbulence and therefore noise, keeping your computer quiet and cool.

 

 

To start, you want to remove both side and front case panels. Then remove the upper left plate of the hard drive cage that is removable to make space for long graphics cards, if you haven’t already. As you see in the picture above I have previously removed mine.

You're also going to want slide out all you're hard drives, ssd’s and drive trays before we pull out the power tools.

 

 

Other than Rivets there are 2 standoffs holding the cage in place, you can find the 2 screws holding them in on the front of the case as you see in the picture above; we’re going to want to remove them. Now the screws won’t remove the standoff but it will free them from the case, you can remove the standoffs once the cage is out of the case if you really want to.

 

 

The cage has a total 8 rivets holding it to the case; we'll start with the 2 hardest to remove. The reason these 2 are difficult to remove is they are hard to reach with a drill, so you have to go in from underneath; from inside the case. Except the bottom of the rivets aren’t flat and make it very hard to drill, if you have a dremel I recommend just cutting them off. Unfortunately I do not; instead I used a pair of angled wire cutters to mutilate them enough to where I could force the drill into the rivet without it slipping off.

This part may take you a while, just be patient and it will work, if anyone has any better idea on how to get rid of these 2 rivets please share.

 

 

The next 2 rivets are pretty easy, the main thing with these is you have to be careful and not break anything; it wouldn’t be too hard to bump into and or rip your graphics card out of your motherboard. You can find these next to your Power Supply. Just drill until the bit punches through the rivets, the rivets may have a tendency to spin, I’m sure there’s a way to stop this, but I personally just adjusted the drilling angle and played with different amounts of force and they came out eventually.

 

 

Now the bottom 4 rivets are pretty straight forward, just flip the case over and drill away.

 

 

And you're done, well almost.

The cage is going to take some twisting and force to get out.

I would try and avoid just bending it in the unlikely case you need to reinstall it,

Which wouldn’t be too hard with some nuts and bolts.

 

 

Now there's a lot of ways you can remount your drives.

But since I only have one I just stuck in the side with some double sided foam tape.

Feel free to share any other good places to "Stick Em".

 

Ok well that’s the end of my tutorial, hope it helps.

This is also my first post so I hope I didn’t do too badly.

I know someone will ask about my system specifications so here they are, but it’s nothing special.

 

Cooler Master CM Storm Scout 2

Asus M5A99X EVO R2.0

AMD FX-6300 Processor

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler

G.SKILL RipjawsX Series 2x4GB

Asus HD7850 DirectCU II V2 Radeon HD 7850 2G

WD 1TB Blue Desktop Hard Drive

Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 850W Modular Power Supply

Asus PCE-N15 Wireless N PCI-E Adapter Card

Asus 24x DVD-RW Drive

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium

Noctua NF-S12A PWM 120mm Case Fan x3

Noctua NF-P12 120mm PWM Fan x1

[MAXXHEW]

I have the same case, thanks for sharing your mod idea... looks cool.  Anyways, a good clean way to securely re-mount your hard drive is to get a 3.5" to 5.25" adapter... then mount your HDD in where you would mount your optical drives, I used that trick in my sons rig (=NonosTrophy=) to

clean it up for better airflow... check out mine (=Scout2=) and his (=NonosTrophy=) builds here: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/MAXXHEW/builds/

[DirtyGamer]

That is a pretty good idea, although the next mod i plan to do is going to be putting a 140mm fan in the optical drive bay box. I could use the adapter and mount the drive to the bottom of the case though that should keep it pretty cool and safe.

[theboy]

hey do you know what the procedure would be to just remove just the top hdd cage? im looking into doing this myself but i would prefer to keep the bottom 4 hard drive slots for mounting.

[Tetters]

hey do you know what the procedure would be to just remove just the top hdd cage? im looking into doing this myself but i would prefer to keep the bottom 4 hard drive slots for mounting.

 

Are they not just screwed together in some way. Most are so its easy to remove one bay but leave the bottom one in place.

[theboy]

Are they not just screwed together in some way. Most are so its easy to remove one bay but leave the bottom one in place.

they are not screwed they are held together by rivets. and the space is small so i wouldn't be able to get a drill in there to get the rivets off, i was thinking about using a dremel and a hammer to get the rivets off but im afraid it will ruin the surrounding metal with scratches/bending ect.

[Tetters]

they are not screwed they are held together by rivets. and the space is small so i wouldn't be able to get a drill in there to get the rivets off, i was thinking about using a dremel and a hammer to get the rivets off but im afraid it will ruin the surrounding metal with scratches/bending ect.

Urgh, that's crazy, sorry to hear that

[DirtyGamer]

they are not screwed they are held together by rivets. and the space is small so i wouldn't be able to get a drill in there to get the rivets off, i was thinking about using a dremel and a hammer to get the rivets off but im afraid it will ruin the surrounding metal with scratches/bending ect.

Hey, sorry for the late reply; i haven't checked up on my Linus account in a while.

So to answer your question, assuming you have the same case as me, the cage is 2 separate parts, if you look at the second last picture where I'm holding the cage in my hand, that's actually only part of the cage, the part that's riveted in. The other upper half is simple screwed in and you can easy remove.