Storage and Power

Anyone who has come out to a LanOC LAN event knows we are all about the storage. So when planning out the Lunchbox 4 build I wanted to make sure that I didn’t skimp out in that area. Partially because hey this is LanOC, but mostly because when you are building a LAN rig the last thing you want to do when getting your PC ready to go to an event is worry about deleting files or games so you have room for the games you plan on playing that weekend. The problem I ran into though was to fit into our tiny case I couldn’t just toss an SSD and a few hard drives into the build. I actually wanted to avoid a mechanical hard drive altogether. With my last two Lunchbox builds that both saw heavy use the spinning drive was the first to have issues. Being transported over and over can quickly cause issues with them, plus mechanical drives add a lot of weight and I wanted to keep the build easy to carry.

Well it just so happened when looking around the LanOC office I actually had gotten in two SSDs from Crucial and they had gotten slipped up under a few other things and missed. They ended up being perfect for this build. One was the Crucial MX200 M.2 500GB SSD, going with an M.2 drive was perfect because it didn’t take up any space at all and was a perfect pick for an OS drive and the 500GB capacity was more than enough for Windows 10 and any programs I might install and any files I might download.

The second drive was the Crucial MX200 1TB SSD. Once again perfect, we avoid any potential issues with a mechanical drive but still have enough capacity for our dedicated games drive. The bonus here was running two SSDs also fits the over the top performance of our Lunchbox builds. The MX200 1TB was an ultra-thin drive and I didn’t know it when I picked it, but the 2.5-inch drive mount in the Metis closest to the motherboard was so close to the motherboard that if I had gone with a normal thickness SSD I don’t think it would have fit.

To power everything in the Lunchbox 4 build I also needed to get a power supply capable of pushing a high-end video card as well as our i7-6700k and everything else. The Metis case that I had picked out is actually designed to work with an ATX power supply, but I knew from the start that I would be going with an SFX power supply. Hell, I used one in Lunchbox 2 and Lunchbox 3, there is no way I was going back to a larger power supply. Plus, in the time between Lunchbox 3 and this build, they had made a few improvements in wattages. At the time, keep in mind that this project has been going on for about 7 months now, Silverstone was really the only good option in SFX. So I went with the Silverstone SST-SX600-G that I had at the time just reviewed. It fit our power requirements and had the thin and flexible modular cables that I love.

Here is a shot showing just how tight the SSD is up under the installed motherboard.