AOpen S145A Mini-ITX Integration Notes

This is one tight chassis to work with:

When putting a system together based on this chassis there are some considerations to keep in mind:

• The 3.5” SATA drive is upside down under the optical drive taking up most of the available space there.
• The optical drive should be lined up with the bezel once the hard drive has been mounted. Once lined up, then tighten up the mounting screws.
• The included slimline optical drive mounting screws may be too long and interfere with the tray mechanism on some models of slimline drives.
• The bezel needs to be off before inserting the optical drive or something may get scratched on the drive or bezel.
• The PSU to motherboard power adapter cable is huge. The best routing for the adapter cable is right behind the optical drive.

The chassis itself provides some good ventilation holes on the top to allow that small fan just “above” the optical drive in the above shot to breath.

In the initial rush of getting things together for the Intel special order that included the AOpen chassis it was initially overlooked that we could not install a 2.5” 7200RPM drive as part of the system configuration.

Keep this in mind when it comes to creating a system specification. Power wise this is not a problem since the chassis comes with the 160Watt PSU that should be more than powerful enough to handle even a Western Digital Raptor drive.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer