OK, so at about 10:30 the machine locked up. I tried restarting, because I've had lockups for the past few days and thought it might have something to do with my overclock.

I believed it to be a problem with Windows Vista, so I reinstalled everything, but it was having trouble writing to the hard disks. It was picking them up, but just not writing. Machine was making funny sounds like disks spinning up, and knew what had happened.

Opened up the side of the case and checked the power and data cables to the hard drives. On first inspection, everything appeared to be OK. On closer inspection, the power connector to the lower hard drive was loose, so I wiggled a bit and it just snapped. Must have been losing the connection. Used a different connector and have been fine ever since, but feel like a nobby for reinstalling Windows and losing all my girlfriends work on Sims 2. I sense my death is imminent.

The connector must have cracked under the strain of putting the side of the case back on at some point - it bends the cables coming out of the hard drives. This case really isn't turning out to be in my favour. Good thing it's aesthetically pleasing though. It's very girlfriend friendly.

Got to bed at 3am.

Hmm, are the HDD SATA cables? Because my SATA powers are right angled...

Of course they are SATA!!!!
Not right angled.

Strange, my Tagan has the cables come out at right angles, like This (except mine are actually part of the PSU).

Right angled cables should easier to tie back. you could try running the SATA cables down towards the bottom of the caddy and stick the wrapped excess to the side or bottom.

The problem he had was they weren't right angled, and therefore stuck out. The nature of his case meant they stuck out towards the side panel, so got moved whenever the cover was put on and off, causing stress and making them come loose and snap when moved. These were actually the power cables and not the data cables, so are hard to replace, as they are part of the PSU.

Yeah. Got myself mixed up a bit there.

It's funny that my last computer (the one I sold) had right angled power connectors (using an Enermax Noisetaker 600W) and I would have preferred the straight connectors. This time, it's the other way around.

Interesting, I don't really see how straight connectors are preferable?

Because of the positions of my hard drives in relation to my power supply. The right angled ones were a real pain in the bum.

I don't really see how that works, the right angles would work really well in all cases I've seen.

Not in my old case

I would stick with straight angled one too. With the right angled connectors, it would make cable management slightly difficult. With right angles i would realistically have one avenue of cable travel, the latter two.

Hmm, so what was different about your old case that made right angles so bad?

The hard drive was at the bottom of the case, with the power cables right angled downwards, toward the bottom of the case. I would rather they went straight out from the hard drive, behind the motherboard tray to the power supply.

Hmm, I tend to put my HDDs in the racks 1 up from the bottom for airflow, the right angles meand the cables can go down to the floor easier. In my current case they actually go up, but I never really bothered with cable management in there (and I did regret it).