The front panel of the Cooler Master HAF XM comes with three external 5.25” bays and two external 3.5”/2.5” bays. These external 3.5” bays, however, are not targeted to floppy disk drives or memory card readers, but to hard drives and SSD units. They feature how-swap connectors, allowing you to install and remove drives without the need of attaching cables and connectors. Each of these bays is actually a small drawer, as you can see in Figure 6, making it very easy to remove or add drives. Furthermore, for 3.5” drives, these drawers feature pegs with rubber rings in order to reduce vibration and noise.

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Figure 5: Front panel

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Figure 6: The external 3.5”/2.5” bays

The case comes with one 200 mm fan on its front panel, using a three-pin fan connector. It comes with an adaptor if you want to connect it to a standard peripheral power connector. This fan has red LEDs that can be turned off through a switch available on the top panel. Further technical specifications for this fan are not provided. You can replace this fan with two 120 mm fans or one 140 mm fan if you want. The case comes with an air filter with fine mesh for the front fan.

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Figure 7: Front fan

The case comes with two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports and the traditional audio jacks at the top part of the front panel. The USB 3.0 port uses an internal USB 3.0 connector.

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Figure 8: Buttons and connectors