When I was in high school I had a friend who upgraded from a 250MB to a 1GB. I thought that was a huge drive at the time (it was), at least as far as capacity went. It was a 3.5-inch drive, much smaller than the 5.25-inch drive he was replacing, but sadly his old computer didn’t have a slot to fit the smaller drive, so we improvised. Duct tape and copper wire saved the day, and we were proud of our ingenuity.
These days, the problems desktop users face, especially power users as my friend was, are heat related. TechEBlog has a couple of neat “cases” people have put together to combat the heat problem in the same way we fought space: elbow grease and guile.
I especially love the one with built of string.