Getting wired and cabled

Our spare SATA data cable

Now that all the bits and pieces are safely in the case, the next things to do is to connect up all those wires that are hanging around.  We thought that might be really tricky, but it turned out to be all OK.  You need to use the instruction book that came with the case and the one that came with the mobo.  First there are the wires that were always part of the case, from the ports and LED lights and switches on the front panel.  These connect to pins on the edge of the mobo (handy tip: white and black wires are 'negative' and coloured wires are 'positive' and you need to get these the right way around for the LEDs).  Next is the big bunch of wires coming out of the power supply - these supply power to everything else.  The two most important supply power to the mobo.  We had a big connector (at 5 Volts) and a smaller one (at 12 Volts).  The others supply power to the hard drives, DVD drive and fans.  We had some wires left over, but that's no problem.  We just tucked them away in the handy space just above the DVD drive, and at least we know they are there if we ever want to add extra drives or other goodies.  The last set of cables are the data cables that connect the drives to the mobo.  We got four of these with the mobo.  They are called SATA cables and our are blue (don't know if they are always blue).  We've used three of the four - one for the solid state drive, one for the disk drive and one for the DVD.  The picture here is of the SATA cable that we didn't use.  We'll keep it safe in case we want to add more drives later.   The wire that we really need to remember is the one from the fan that's attached to the removable side panel.  This gets its power from pins on the mobo and so now, when we open up the case, we need to be careful that we don't yank the cable out.