This case has seven external 5 ¼” bays, four on the top of the unit and three on the bottom. All of them use a very efficient screwless mechanism that works like a charm. You can convert any of the 5 ¼” bays into one external 3 ½” bay for a floppy disk drive or a memory card reader. The case also comes with the front cover to match the 3 ½” device. This adaptor can also be used if you want to add one extra hard disk drive.
On the hard disk drive side, this case has six internal 3 ½” bays divided into two cages, which are located between the top 5 ¼” bays and the bottom ones. So you can have up to six or seven (if the floppy disk drive adaptor is used and you don’t have this kind of device) hard disk drives with this case. Hard disk drives bays are located perpendicular to the 5 ¼” bays and there is a 140-mm fan (1,000 rpm, glows red when turned on) cooling down the hard disk drives. Like all other fans from this case, you can’t control or monitor its speed.
click to enlarge
Figure 18: Front of the case with the plastic front panel removed.
Each hard disk drive is installed in the internal 3 ½” bays using a small drawer. The whole mechanism doesn’t require the use of tools or screws and works very well. Each drawer uses two small rubber shock absorbers in order to prevent the natural vibration produced by the hard disk drive motors from propagating to the rest of the case and thus reducing the noise level. This is a very desirable feature.
click to enlarge
Figure 19: Hard disk drive drawer.
You can, if you want, purchase hot swap connectors to install at each hard disk drive bay. This way you can install and remove hard disk drives to this case without needing to connect cables to the drive.
You can remove the hard disk drive cages and install them inside the 5 ¼” bays. If you do this, however, you will reduce the number of available 5 ¼” bays, as you can’t reuse the space that was being used by the hard disk drive cages for installing 5 ¼” devices (see Figure 21). But since most users won’t have more than one 5 ¼” device anyway, this can be a good option if you are an airflow freak, because by removing the hard disk drive cages you allow the air pulled by the front fan to go straight to the motherboard and daughter boards. On the other hand, you will create a communication between the daughter boards chamber and the CPU chamber.
click to enlarge
Figure 20: One of the hard disk drive cages and the two plastic parts necessary to install it in the 5 ¼” bays.
click to enlarge
Figure 21: The two hard disk drive cages reinstalled inside the 5 ¼” bays.
