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How to cable manage a computer

2018-02-27
what's up guys Jase $0.02 here and it's time for me to build our news server the team is growing we've got more people now accessing the footage so we actually need to have a way to have a central place for all of this footage to be grabbed with all these hard drives any guesses as to who supplied these yes I'm actually working with Linus tech tips and Seagate on this projects we've got a whole plethora of iron wolf Pro drives ten terabyte drives but we got to build a server here so anyway that's actually not the point today's video though I wanted to kind of tease what's coming up today I'm actually gonna show you how to do cable management probably one of the most recommended videos I've ever been asked to do and usually I'm like you just zip tie the thing to the thing and put it out of the way and you're done but it continues to be requested and I thought what better video to do that on then a video that has a ton of hard drives and a lot of power cables and things to try and make 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take your online security serious so save 77% off your three-year membership at Nord VPN by using my link in the description below that's Nord VPN comm / J's two cents let's see what the parts are going this build real quick this will start with the main platform this is the X $2.99 workstation from Asus so you might notice I have an X 99 for a box up here because that's what they sent it in this was actually an early access board I don't know if it's fully out yet I'm a little disappointed I'm gonna say that up front simply because they dramatically stripped the number SATA ports that are on this the old one had like 14 this one has six so I'm really disappointed which means the build is not going to be fully functional today because I have to add a SATA controller or RAID controller on there so there's going to be some are gonna be on the rate controller some are going to be on board which kind of stinks I would like to have all been handled on board but I digress that's not that important we'll get that working out so we're running a seventy nine hundred X ten core twenty thread CPU we're gonna be running I want to run 64 gigs of DDR four I've got 32 here for now we'll probably be adding more to this because this is going to be an interesting build it's not just the nez it's gonna be also doubling as a workstation so it's gonna be a physical box and a virtual machine and a server all-in-one so that's where this is obviously a little bit different than the typical like 45 drives projects that Linus was working with and with Seagate mines gonna obviously be tailored to the needs that we have here now I've got a Titan XP actually it's a Titan X little P no not a little Pete whatever it's always it's confusing it's always confusing this is not the newest one it has a DVI port but we're not actually using this for gaming this is going to be our pass-through this is gonna be used to actually communicate between VM and physical box not for gaming so we're using this simply because of the amount of CUDA cores and the throughput speed that this has so don't confuse this as a gaming rig and we also have two one terabyte SSD now drives these are going to be our cache drives for all of these spinning mechanical drives so that's what these are going to be for you guys might notice here we also have a master wood master wat maker 1200 big giant heavy power supply because of all of these drives and stuff we're gonna be adding as much power as possible just for safety we're gonna be cooling it with the Celsius s 36 now is torn on this because this is also doubling as a server not just a workstation we want reliability so that's why we're not doing a custom water-cooled rigid tube or any of that stuff because if something fails in this system we need to be able to fix it fast and if we're going with a custom loop fast is not really part of that algorithm so we're gonna be using a Celsius s 36 now the reason why I'm going with an a IO because I was still kind of torn on doing that versus air is because this system is also going to be render videos and it's doubling as our ingest station which means it's the it's the station we're going to be bringing all of our footage to our server I want to keep the CPU as cool as possible because it's going to be doing it's going to have allocated course for the VM it's gonna be allocated cores for the rendering station we want to keep it cool that way we can run faster clocks and get better performance out of premiere but the reason why I chose the Celsius s 36 specifically is again one cable to make all the fans work so I don't want to have a lot of cables going everywhere and an a IO is easy enough to replace if it goes bad and then we are going to be putting this in the brand-new gunmetal fractal design r6 because of all of that harddrive support and I can still fit a front-mounted radiator if I want to front mount this or we can put it on top but I don't have to sacrifice drive storage or water cooling I can have both and because I can fit all of those hard drives in there that is why we chose that now I've got 15 of these terabyte are these 10 terabyte drives that's a hundred and 50 terabytes I don't know if they're all gonna be going in this build right now but we're gonna be putting in as many as we can so we've got a few extra drive cages that we stole out of a couple of the other r6 as we have laying around here just to get as many as we can in there so without further ado let's build it and then that's cable manager so obviously we just built all of this to get the perfect well this is like a perfect storm look at these are all the cables I've got to get to fit inside this box neatly so what I like to do first of all when I'm doing my cable management is I connect everything to the power supply first a lot of people like to connect to the component and then to the power supply but I find it easier to deal with if I've got the power supply pre-mounted and all the cables hanging out now I haven't installed anything yet cable wise except for the front panel connectors and the USB 3.0 I've got my fan headers over here so we're gonna we're gonna see how well I can actually do with this this I've got my work cut out for me because I chose also the master watt maker cooler master maker maker whatever they called themselves now the look at this 24-pin connector this thing is massive I mean that's this is this is we got an obd ii scanner for a car anyway so what you notice here is i have all eight drives put in right here now one of the reasons why I have arranged like this as you can see I still have room down here for excess cables now you might look at this and think well that's blocking off all the airflow it's actually not there's quite a bit of gap in between each one of these hard drives so this is set up pretty well we've got a little bit of airflow up top we've got airflow on the bottom so I think this is a really good example of making sure you have enough space to hide cables because really cable management as nothing more than hiding them and then trying to route cables together now something else you're gonna need obviously a zip ties or lots of twist ties something to hold the cables together and what you're going to notice I do when I'm doing this is you're gonna find me zip tying things together and then clipping it and redoing it and clipping it and redoing it and probably wasting zip ties but it's because I like to kind of hold things in place while I'm planning and then when I'm done at the end then I zip tie everything together now I'm gonna set these aside for now these are gonna be less and the reason why I do this last is because if you've ever dealt with SATA power or SATA cables these little plastic tabs are easy to break off so as we're moving cables around and stuff I don't want to accidentally break anything on our nice expensive hard drives so we're gonna do now is we're gonna kind of separate our power based on logic we're gonna take out 24-pin we're gonna take our PCI Express cable the PSU power for this motherboards are this PSU zl-- interesting where normally they would split into two four pins at the end Coolermaster just chose to split it apparently all the way down the sleeve so I'm gonna set those aside because now I can visually see okay this I know these are four main components these are all my SATA plugs for my hard drives my fan controller from fractal and then our two SSDs right here because I've got length on this never got pigtail on this I want this to be a part of this cable harness that's gonna go this way so now I know okay I need one harness it has three going over here and two harnesses over here because I've got as you can see four SATA connectors per cable or four harness I've got two of those going this way and one of them going this way so you can kind of see I'm sort of visualizing now how the separation of the wiring is going to go now fortunately the r6 has a lot of well-thought-out cable management tie down spots we got velcro straps here we've got loops all over the place to allow us to zip tie to so I'm gonna go ahead and do now the main components and get those out of the way so that I only have to deal with all of our all of our accessories so the r6 also has it's very own fan controller on here allowing me to have again one connection point to deal with pretty much all my fans you notice what I did right here though is it kind of took the length and then I sort of just folded it over till I had sort of a clump of wires here if you will and trying to make it all sort of the same length so we'll kind of do that again so you can see see they're not exactly the same length but if I take them and just sort of fold it like this now we've made a single harness here it's much easier for us to just zip tie and get it out of the way something else that really helps too is to have a set of side cutters so that you can just sort of snip it and move it out of the way I'm sort of just getting things where I want them to be then I will clean it up I don't try and do it all in one pass so it's going to take this behemoth have a 24-pin I'm gonna go ahead and use this guy right here and I'm gonna just sort of push this through like that now I can plug it in yet I'm just gonna sort of get it out of the way same thing with my PCI Express I'll have both of these cables coming through the same grommet so that again I can route these together to get him out of the way now I don't think I have anything else that's gonna actually go up through this harness right here with the velcro so I'm not gonna tighten it down yet tight I'm just gonna sort of route this like that again dealing with visuals here visualize it see already I velcroed this one I shouldn't have because I'm gonna do eight pin DPS power up through here as well usually I'll come up like this for eight pin power but I think in this case because I don't have a lot of length I'm just gonna have this follow up through the main channel as well and then I'm just gonna push that through for now so if I flip this around you can see oh my god this is heavier than I expected it to be with all those drives you can see nothing's plugged in yet we set of cables is sort of flopping around here but that's because we can't start to strap anything down in the back until we have all of the slack out of the front so that's why I kind of do things in this in this manner I just sort of slowly give things a way to go and get them out of the way so we are almost to the point where we can start nailing this down this guy I think I'm just going to leave running right along the bottom right here because this is what's gonna get power to my two SATA drives here and my fan controller and then these are the two that are gonna go here now instead of routing this around the outside of this support bracket right here I'm gonna put this on the inside because I've got more room there so why the heck not but I think this is the part that a lot of people make mistakes on they just start tying everything down as they're plugging in and then they realize oh crap I need to redo it now as tempted as I am to start plugging these in I'm not gonna do this yet again I want anything to do with SATA power or SATA cables to be the last because I don't want to break those plastic tabs so now we're gonna start plugging things in on the front side so this has to kind of fold this way because of where the little retaining clip is so I'm gonna push that back through and I'm gonna go ahead and give me my bend now plug this in here and there's that and as you can see because it's flat cables I just routed it all flat like that and now the slack is sticking through on the backside all right so I'm just gonna relocate it to this bottom grommet here so it looks a little less crowded up here although the appearance of this truly doesn't matter this is a purely function over form build it would bother me so the only thing left to do on the front now is going to be our eight pin power which is up here at the top and this one is usually pretty tight so I like to lay the computer flat I mean just a whole lot easier to install these when the case is flat because you're looking down so much more natural so again just push the slack out the backside and now we'll work on the actual cable management so remember how I said that these cables were kind of twisted in there so what I did was I unplugged these from the power supply side so that I can sort of lay these all flat like they need to be and now I'm gonna start sort of zip tying these together as sort of a harness they're flat cables they're designed for them to be able to get really flat obviously behind motherboard panels and case panels so it's gonna allow you to have more room plus you can see just how much neater this is but what I also do is I'll get a few started but I won't crank them down as tight as I can I wanna be able to slide them along the harness if I need to adjust where they're actually you know grabbing on to our cables tighten those down cut off our excess and you can see we get a much neater appearance here so and look at that what you just look at it little zip tie pro tip that I like to do is just once these are done and clipped is just sort of rotate that behind that way just has a nice cleaner look but now that we're done with this cable I can go and plug this back into the power supply side of things and get this out of the way ok so the next area focus that I'm going to focus on here and I'm saying the word focus a lot let's focus on all but focusing on focusing on we are going to do the same thing with the eight pin EPS there's a loop right here on top of this case and this is what we are going to use to strap it down up top now that loop is probably gonna be kind of hard to push a zip tie through this what you can do is you can take the end of the zip tie and sort of bend it like a hook so you take this like a hook and just sort of hook it through the eyelet there and money it's not that's ready to go we can just sort of collect our wires up here at the end of our zip tie and then these guys will be ready to go but once again don't tighten it down just get it started because we might end up needing to move this guy because we want to control the amount of slack we have down here too and we can do that up here by actually allowing this to sort of Bend like that if that makes sense so make sure we're not too much slack on that side so I'm pretty comfortable with how that is go ahead and just tighten that down enough to where it won't move so with the flat cables you want to try and get them to be as flat as possible make sure they're all sort of going the same direction and then you can zip tie them down on the radius in the middle of the cable and then for me again down here on this radius we're gonna clip these little tails off try not to clipping who hires I have done that I have clipped wires while clipping zip ties rotate these so they're not showing and we're gonna route this guy right here next to our 24 pin now our 24 pin PCI Express and 8 pin power are done and out of the way someone do this area next I've got eyelet here here and there which is awesome so because I know I need SATA power here in here I just kind of want to get it somewhere in this part of the case if it's there that it's more dangly and in the way on this part of the case we sawed up open unobstructed space there I'm not gonna put anything in this eyelet because I want to have some slack right there I mean I could I'd still be alright but maybe I'll do that at the end now in terms of the SATA cables I'm not going to route this up and around because as you can see that would not work so I'm just going to go ahead and focus on getting these plugged in and back in their spot so it's better to remove the drive when you go to plug it in then to try and finagle because again if you're trying to get it in there and you pretty much force on this plastic you're gonna break it so unhook it do yourself a favor and then once you get it put it back on the case tighten it down you know that one so I'm just gonna kind of squeeze those wires together like that take the slack plug this into let's go to this one so we have an extra slot left if I ever need it for lighting or something and then I'm literally gonna just sort of push that kind of out of the way now we're gonna do the power PCI Express power cables for our graphics cards exact same philosophy that I showed you when I did the eight pin and the 24 pin make it flat zip tie it together snip our little tails off of there have your tools out of reach that's important part of cable management and then we are going to just we're gonna borrow this one right here now we're because we're not gonna be going back in there and now we can pull it fairly tight and that's what that looks like here's what we've got left we've got the two SATA harnesses for our hard drives and let's just start for up one two three four plug this guy in and give it a little loop look that guy in a little loop put that guy in a little loop and put that guy in then we take the loops gently and don't put any lateral force on that gently flatten the loops so now we're going to do the same thing and we're going to run on the left side of the SATA we can't run to the right side because if we do we have the SATA plugs right there and that worked out perfectly so now if we go forth from the top one make a loop to make loop so we do the same thing so give a little crease run that one right over the top and there is our power for our hard drives last thing I'm gonna do just like you guys saw me do on the other ones I'm going to zip tie these two together right at the bottom so now I'm just gonna do the same thing with USB 3.0 and zip tie these together anyone that's worked with USB 3.0 cables know that they are they are a mess they are stiff they don't want to bend they're always in a double harness like this and they're just a complete pain but they are a necessary pain because USB 3.0 so the HD audio I'm just gonna kind of push I'll go along the floor that just to get it out of the way but I'm not hooking this up to anything because like I said I don't use HD audio for anything I never use frontside audio connectors so this already looks great I mean everything is managed you can tell where everything's going I mean could you ask for anything better oh yeah we're forgetting something are we SATA cables so I'm gonna go ahead and do all these SATA cables at once here but it's the same logic that I just applied and showed you guys with the rest of the case the only reason I do these last is because like I said I don't want these plugged in getting yanked on and breaking the plastic tabs on the drives so yeah we're to go ahead and do this we'll come back at the end see how it looks and then we'll wrap it up but guys this is how you take a case like this ten hard drives including the SSDs and make it look I mean that's better cable managing some systems I've seen that have one hard drive so anyway let's go ahead and see what this looks like when we're done well guys here it is this is what the front looks like and this is the business and the side you see this is the part where most of the time if people are fine with how this looks they don't care how the backside looks but obviously this is a tutorial about cable management and this is how it looks even with all of the SATA cables so you can kind of see what I did right here I've got the cables routed together this is a separate harness of cables this is gonna go to my SATA controller for my RAID controller when that comes in so I've got them harnessed and ready to go so once that's plugged into my PCI Express slot I just plug those in and we're good to go but you can see we don't have a huge clump of cables down there we've got good airflow everything is easy to trace that's what cable management's all about being able to trace your cables if you have to fix something or play something rewire something then you're able to see where it is and follow it easily anyway you guys want ask me forever to do a how-to cable manage video this is it I chose probably one of the more difficult scenarios with all these drives so it scales down from here alright guys we're gonna go now thanks for watching today's video if you guys have any suggestions let me know that's how videos like this come about if you're new around here or you enjoy today's video won't you consider giving a like and subscribe if you're new anyway thanks for watching guys we will see you in the next one
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