The Matrix VX before being tinkered with.

Upon switching my comp into a shiny new Thermal Take Matrix case a week or so ago my twisted little mind started wondering just what I could do to make the case snazzier. I'm still considering painting the front grilles red just to see how it looks, but frankly that's a brutal amount of work and I'm a little lazy right now so I can't be bothered. I'm also a little short on cash after buying the new case and power supply so it had to be cheap. I settled on two things:

1) Do the same thing I've done with every case I'd had in the last few years and add a blue cold cathode light to the inside of the case for that extra lighty goodness.

and

2) Hide my DVD-ROM and DVD-RW and retain the original sleek look of the case.

And so I set to work. Step 1 was easily acomplished by getting myself a Thermal Take sound activated blue cold cathode light and putting it in the bottom of my case. I then turned it on and amused myself for quite some time by tapping my fingers on my desk and watching the light flash on and off to the beat. Once I got bored I turned the sound activation off, and picked up the drive bay covers that I'd removed from the slots that now held my optical drives. I cut the little retaining tabs off the bay covers with an extaco knife in two parts. The tabs are L shaped so I first cut the outter part off, then cut the inner part even with the bay cover and shaved it down flat. I then broke off the little clips that retain the sides of the metal grille cover, used a hammer and taped the remaining metal at the ends of the bay cover so it was flat, and sanded it down a little bit with some fine sandpaper.

We then tried the drive covers to see if they'd work just like this, but sadly the trays were set back into the optical drives so we needed to make a little standoff before we glued the drive bay cover into place. We used the four little pieces of plastic we cut off the drive bay cover tabs to make a little standoff to glue to the front of our DVD drives . If you look at the back of the drive bay cover there's a crossbar, which I wanted to make thicker to give me more surface to hold onto the drive's tray. I crazy glued one of the pieces of plastic to the side of each of the crossbars, flush with it and let it dry. I then crazy glued the other piece of plastic across the crossbar and the little piece of plastic we'd glued to it and let it dry for a few minutes.

The drive bay cover with standoffs glued onto it.

We ejected the optical drives and popped the front bezels off of the trays and the front of the drives. After removing the bezels we retracted the drives and double checked that our two new bezels fit into place nicely, which they did. No snags or hangups. Crazy glue was then applied to the little standoffs we'd just put into the bottom drive bay cover and it was put into place against the tray and let dry for a few minutes. Once it was dry we ejected the drive (My computer, right click on the optical drive, eject) to make sure the everything lined up and worked and that we hadn't put glue where glue should not have been... Which would have been bad and was on my mind the entire time I was working on this little project.

The bottom cover is in place, the top is still naked and cold.

Nice. It actually ejected and worked.

Once everything ejected and seemed healthy we did the top drive and all was good. I've now got a slick little mod with hidden optical drives. Theres a few minor downsides to the mod however:

1) You can no longer eject the drive with a pin in an emergency. If it came to that though the drive is generally dead and you can just break the glue and pull the drive bay cover off, no harm done.

2) The drives are louder without the stock covers sealing them off but not annoyingly so.

3) You don't have an eject button anymore. You can do the above mentioned right click on the optical drive in my computer to eject it but that's going to get old pretty quickly. I looked around on the internet and found a great little freeware utility called CD-ROM Tray Pal that puts an icon on your system tray, just right click on it and hit eject. It works on multiple drives and you can even map the eject/retract functions to hotkeys. In my case I'm using CTRL-D to eject my D drive and CTRL-E to eject..... You guessed it. The E drive.

4) You have to remember to eject your drives before popping the front panel off the case or you'll damage the drives/covers.

And the Matrix VX after the mod. Slick or what?

Gotta have the extra blue lights inside.

Over all I'm really pleased with the way the mod turned out. It's slick as all get out and looks great. Total cost for the mod? $15.00 CDN for the cold cathode light, $3.00 CDN for a bottle of Super Crazy Glue and about 45 minutes of my time. Not to shabby at all.