No, my Supermicro motherboard still hasn’t arrived, so I can’t really start the build, but I did manage to allay one of the fears I had about the internal WD drives.

You might have spotted in an earlier picture, but the hole layout on the bottom of the drives is slightly different with only 4 holes instead of the usual 6. I was a little worried these wouldn’t align with the holes in the R5 drive trays, but I needn’t have as they are well designed with rubber grommets that can go in any number of positions.

They are at the very edges of where they could go, but that’s perfectly fine. I thought I might as well ‘shuck’ the remaining drives and put them in the trays, as well as fixing the 2 SSDs to the back of the motherboard tray.

I also managed to slot the power supply into the case, and the sprawl of SATA cables. I just hope these work with the drives, otherwise, I’ll need a creative solution to power them all.

And I also got to fit the extra case fan into the front. It’s slightly different to the one in the case but is a Fractal Design fan

Come on the motherboard! I’m ready to put this thing together…