Mounting Our SSD
We're not going to bother with a large 3.5” hard disk. Not only do we want to avoid its noise, but Lian Li's optional motor kit also takes up the space you'd use for mechanical storage (a fact the manual fails to mention). It's only when you open the motor kit's instructions that you're told to move an SSD to the tender car instead.
We're using Corsair's 480 GB Neutron GTX, which is plenty fast and large for any usage model. Of course, if you're on a tighter budget, a 2.5" notebook hard drive would work just as well for enabling high capacity, though performance naturally suffers.
It'd be smart to use the rubber grommets for mounting a mechanical disk. They help decouple the drive's vibrations from the chassis (and, vice versa, they protect the repository from a moving locomotive). They also make it easier to get the SSD installed, too, though.
The grommets slide into place perfectly, though you'll want to attach the data and power cables before you get that far. Again, removing the bottom plate would make all of this easier, as I discovered later.
While you can certainly install a 2.5” SSD or mobile hard drive in the tender, there are no mounting points there. If you use the motor kit, you'll find that it rattles and vibrates a lot. Thus, an SSD is definitely preferable over a mechanical disk in this case.
