After that was done, I used the front bezel from a 24X CD ROM drive I had laying around, and attached it to the front of the Xbox drive with 3M super double stick tape. Viola! functioning button.
Now that it kind of looks like a standard drive, the fun begins!
1st off, the 360 drive is wider than a standard 5 1/4" drive. Some "delicate" surgery is required to get it to fit into a standard slot. For my surgery I chose some tin snips and a hack saw to remove those pesky ears.
Not pretty, but it gets the job done. Now that the drive can physically fit into my case, how do I get it mounted since it does not have the standard mounting holes? "Just drill some holes" you might say. Well, as much as I enjoy drilling holes in stuff, I did not want to risk damaging the drive inside. I mean this is a $200 experiment, so I chose the next best thing to drilling.......duct tape. I decidced to just duct tape the drive to the DVD drive below it, and just slide the whole contraption into the case. Piece of cake.
Now that our franken-drive is ready to mounted into my case, its time to hook up the USB and power. Oh Boy!
1st lets tackle power. The backplane on the 360 Drive is special and has both the USB and power connectors on it. We'll use both of these, and rig them into the case. The power connector uses 12v, 5v and 3.3v. So some tom foolerey will be needed. Lets begin. 1st we'll make a power cable to connect to a standard PC power supply connector. That will give us our 12v, 5v and ground, but we'll still need to get 3.3v from somewhere. Here's the cable. Notice the naked cable hanging off the end. That's for the 3.3v
The best place to get 3.3v is from the motherboard connector on the power supply. That's why we have the naked cable. Using a "T" tap, we tap into the 3.3v connector on the motherboard, and give the Xbox HD DVD drive the 3.3v its hungry for.
Now that power is taken care of, lets get this thing hooked up with some signal. Since the Xbox drive is USB, we will continue to use that connector and team it up with a USB header on my motherboard. Some more custom cable work yields a nice cable with a header connector on one end, and the 360 backplance connector on the other.
Now all that's left is to connect up the drive. Here's what the back looks like all cabled up and pretty
And of course the picture you've all been waiting for.......Here's what it looks like mounted in the case (middle drive)
Just like a standard drive! Yay, no pesky external Xbox looking devices!
