Installing Hard Drive and DVD

Of the many nice features included in the Antec Sonata Designer 500 are the 3½" HDD suspension mechanism and 5¼" Universal Drive doors.

Lets see how helpful these are for the installation...

Installing the Hard Drive

For building my quiet Hackintosh, I decided to use the suspension mechanism of the case, as it greatly reduces hard drive noise, by eliminating transmission of the vibrations generated by the HDD to the case.

With the help of the well-written Antec manual, I mounted the HDD in a breeze.
It all comes down to:

• Twisting the front suspender,
• Slide the HDD through the suspender,
• Twisting the rear suspender,
• Slide the HDD through the suspender.

Installing the DVD

The Antec Sonata Designer 500 includes two Universal Drive Doors.
These white doors are a nice touch that keeps the aesthetics of the case, even with a black DVD drive.
I proceed to install the DVD Drive:

• Attached a pair of drive rails to the drive,
• I started by positioning it so it's as deep in the case as possible,
• Then moved it forward until the "eject" button of the white cover makes contact with the actual Eject button of the drive,
• Not installing it "deep" enough in the case obstructs the DVD door's spring
• It took some fiddling to get the right position

With the mechanical parts in place, it was time to start cabling.