Design dilemma for my casebuild

[Thrackan]

First of all, let me say I love all those creative builders out here. Some amazing work!
On the other hand, browsing through some logs was a pain in the bum, because it kept me up for several hours last night.
Why? I was doubting my initial building plans.

Here's my original design:
Click! (big pic)
And here's the stuff I'm going to work with:

Now, the basics are this: I've got
- a mini-itx board
- a CF card on adapter as primary OS HDD
- a slimline CD drive
- a 4x40 character LCD
- a "shuttle" form factor PSU

Then I decided to add my two "spare" Spinpoint 500GB HDD's into the mix and things got woozy. It won't fit without making the case a little bigger, so I started thinking about more designs:

Design one: the original design, but with a little more depth, making it a flattened cube, still mounting the fans on both sides. Downside: a 25x25cm cube takes more space than I anticipated.

Design two: the two fans on top, a little extra width, PSU on one side of the board, HDD's on the other side. Makes quite the wide box then though.

Design three: design two, but with one fan on top and one on the front. Does blow away the "clean" front view.

Design four: "the totally different one", I make an extra "cage" to hold the two extra HDD's and come up with an ingenious design to make it easily pluggable on internal SATA as I refuse to put them on USB. (The SATA power cables won't even be the problem as I've got a solution for that already)

All designs have their drawbacks as I really like the push-pull side-to-side fan config, but it's severely restricting my possibilities to do something handy with the PSU and HDD's without making the case more bloated than I intended or severely blocking the airflow.

Big question no. 2 by the way: I've got a slimline CD player, but I can only put screws in on one side. Anyone who has a genius idea to fix that? Sideways mounting severely blocks airflow...

Oh ye of great mods and builds, thy input is greatly appreciated!

 

[Thrackan]

Thanks guys! Great input!

Yeah, I figured something out, will SketchUp the idea when I get home in a couple of hours...

 

[Exavier]

I was going to suggest placing them sideways, but as you have a solution, go with that
however, your singular pic isn't very clear...

also might I point out that your mobo might not support you using adapted CF as a boot drive..and that they're pretty slow anyway..(but I can see the point I was going to do that myself haha)

 

[Thrackan]

Revised!

First off, I already have a Windows install running smoothly on the CF card It's a 266x Kingston card, supposedly doing up to 40 MB/s. Once I got everything put together, I'll get you a HD Tach screenie

Second, I revised my design. Clickies:
Backside
Frontside
Left side

I'm going to place the PSU, HDD's and the CF+adapter in a big frickin' bracket, but that's something I'll leave to your imagination until I've built it and posted pics

As you can see, I'm mounting the slimline towards the side. I wasn't 100% keen on that, but I believe it will look pretty nice, especially since I'll be making USB ports on the exact opposite side.
The drive will be screwed tight on one side (the side that's facing the bottom), since I can't screw on more, but this will probably be fine. I might "clamp" it between two pieces of alu profile if that's not enough.

Comments are still welcomed!

Extra extra!
I just fiddled around with 2 HDD's and 2 92mm fangrills. See what I did here!

 

[Exavier]

oh alright awesome, just thought I'd point it out as some don't like it
and I like what I'm seeing, is that lcd the designated front then?

 

[Thrackan]

Yeah, the LCD side is the front. I'm getting a small LCD screen which I will try to solder and get working as a VGA display, just for kicks

The rest of my build can be followed here:
Worklog Clicko!

It's not much yet, but you might get a better idea of what it will look like.