The Disk Drive Bays

This case has seven 5 ¼” bays (one comes with a 3 ½” adaptor for installing a floppy disk drive) and eight internal 3 ½” bays for hard disk drives. If you don’t have a floppy disk drive then you can use this adaptor for installing a ninth hard disk drive, if you are really a storage freak. These internal 3 ½” bays are located inside two removable hard disk drive cages, located on the lower section of the case in a separated compartment. This compartment is cooled by one 120-mm fan located on the front of the case.

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Figure 13: Hard disk drive cages.

The cages are fastened to the case using thumbscrews, so no tool is necessary to remove them from the case. This case, however, doesn’t use screwless mechanisms for installing hard disk drives. You will need to fasten four screws to each drive.

On the other hand this case uses an anti-vibration mechanism. Each screw uses a rubber ring to avoid the natural vibration from each hard disk drive to propagate to the case chassis, thus reducing the noise produced by them. The screws must be installed with the hard drive outside the cage and after four screws are attached to the drive you can install the drive in any hard disk drive bay by simply sliding it in.

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Figure 14: One of the cages outside the case.

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Figure 15: Screws and rubber rings that must be attached to each hard disk drive.

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Figure 16: Hard disk drive with the screws and rubber rings installed.

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Figure 17: Hard disk drive installed in one of the hard disk drive bays. See how the rubber ring fits the bay.

This case only use screwless mechanisms on four of its 5 ¼” bays. The top two 5 ¼” bays and the last 5 1/4” bay aren’t provide with such devices. The last bay is understandable, as it comes with the 3 ½” adaptor installed, but the two top bays are the ones that comes with the “fake faces” for your optical drives, so you will have to use regular screws on them.