Free harddrive cage mod.

KazerTheKeen · January 10, 2018

So I decided to finally do something about the hardrive bays in my Cougar Spike. Its not in production anymore and I've had it for 5 years now but I don't want to get a new case just yet. The two bigggest issues with it are its cablemanagement (or lack therof) and it's harddrive cage. Not much I can do about the cable management but I decidied to do something about the hardrive cage. I don't have issues with ram clearence but I wanted to be able to swap out a drive without needing to remove the mobo or cpu heatsink. I also didn't want to go to the store luckily I had tools and a couple zipties.

The cage was rivited in but drilled out easily. Then i took a hacksaw to upper portion of it to just get the two 3.5" bays on the bottom. It took a while but its thin steel and I was actually able to cut it with metal snips though it wasn't as clean of a cut, and I ended up just cleaning it up with the hack saw. I added a couple holes to the cage as a mounting point, touched it up with some black paint and ziptied it to the fan grill. My case fan had gone out a couple months earlier so I only have a cpu and graphics card fan. It stays cool enough for the most part. I also managed to "mount" the ssd in with some screws to some holes in the cage so now its not floating around the bottom of the case.

Finished pictures with the drives in but not the rest of the computer. Unfortionately they're the only ones I took.

Spoiler

This is the front I ended up adding a third ziptie near the bottom.

This is the actual cage it doesn't look to bad and no longer interfears with things.

Its a little ghetto but it makes the case look and feel better much better than prior. Not that the insides ever see the light of the sun.

In the future I might make a powersupply cover/mobo skirt to hide my cabels and drives behind and reopen the fanslot. I would probably also remake the front to go along with it. But for now I'm happy with the result. Anywho let know what You fine people of the interwebs think of this.