This post continues my ongoing journey of building a new gaming PC from the ground up. In the previous parts, I’ve already covered the planning phase, component selection, and the small (but painful) adventures that came with choosing ultra-compact hardware and pushing performance into a tiny case. If you’re just joining the series, I highly recommend starting from the beginning:
- A Gaming System That Was Never Meant to Be Just a Gaming System
- Building the System: When Smaller Meant Harder
In this chapter, we finally move to the most satisfying—and sometimes most frustrating—stage of the build: final assembly and storage choices.
When it came time to choose storage, I decided to make things… slightly more complicated than necessary. Instead of going with a single large drive and calling it a day, I built a small ecosystem of disks, each with its own job and purpose. Overkill? Maybe. Organized? Absolutely.
For the system root (/) partition on Linux, I picked the fastest option available: a top-tier NVMe SSD 9100 PRO from Samsung, capable of write speeds up to 14,000 MB/s. This drive is dedicated purely to the operating system and swap file. No distractions, no random files, just Linux running as fast as it possibly can and pretending it owns the whole machine.
Next came another NVMe SSD 990 pro from Samsung again, also high-speed, with write speeds of up to 5,000 MB/s. This one is used exclusively for linux home directory (/home/). And if you’ve ever looked inside a home directory, you know it slowly becomes a digital junk drawer: configs, downloads, experiments, screenshots, half-finished ideas… everything ends up there by the end of the day.
For bulk storage, I added two 2 TB SATA SSDs RE100 from Aser. One is dedicated to Ai models and large data sets, and the other is reserved for my game library—because games don’t need insane NVMe speeds, but they do appreciate fast and silent storage.
Once the storage plan was finalized and I finally solved the problem with a custom power cable (which deserves its own horror story), everything started to go much more smoothly. The system powered on, all drives were detected, and I could finally connect the remaining peripherals without holding my breath.
Then came the final challenge: somehow fitting everything neatly into a case that clearly didn’t want to cooperate.
Cable management space was… optimistic at best. There wasn’t much room to hide cables, so I spent a good amount of time wrestling with the top fans, trying to neatly route and conceal their wires. The CPU cooler fan cables joined the party as well, just to make sure nothing was too easy. At some point, it felt less like PC building and more like advanced origami with cables.
Surprisingly, installing Ubuntu on the new system went smoothly. No issues at all, except the ones I created myself. Once again, I forgot to disable Secure Boot, something I manage to forget every single time. While turning it off solves the problem instantly, I really should sit down one day and properly understand how to configure Secure Boot in Ubuntu, sign NVIDIA drivers correctly, and avoid boot issues altogether.
But that’s a story for another post.
For now, the system is assembled, compact, fast, and finally running exactly as intended—after a few lessons, some cable wrestling, and the usual reminders that nothing is ever truly “plug and play.”
After installing Ubuntu, I spent a few extra minutes doing some final housekeeping: adjusting the swap file size to 48GB and adding two SATA SSDs to the system, making sure they were properly mounted and accessible for a non-root user.