Antec Sonata Plus 550 Case Review

Hard Disk Drive Installation: Suspension

If you are paranoid with noise this case also offers a suspension mechanism, which is basically a thick rubber band used to install your hard disk drive “floating” inside the hard disk drive cage. To make this mechanism to work correctly, you need to remove the four metallic drawers. If you leave the drawers the hard disk drives will eventually touch the metallic part of the case, generating noise and thus turning the suspension idea useless. So you have to choose between one system and the oth
er.

In theory you can squeeze seven slim hard disk drives into this case, four using the drawers and three using the suspensions, but you would have all drives touching metallic parts, killing the low-noise idea, as explained.

In Figure 27, you can see the three suspension mechanisms.

Figure 27: Suspension mechanisms.

To install a hard disk drive just slide it between the rubber bands, as shown in Figure 28.

Figure 28: Hard disk drive installed.

The hard disk drive, however, will be too loose, making it to slide and fall during transportation. So you need to tighten the rubber band, what can be done by twisting the four plastic holders present (two at each side of the case), see Figure 29:

Figure 29: Twist the plastic holder to tighten the rubber band. Do this with all four holders.

The plastic holders present on the right side of the case feature a cable holder, which is convenient to store the excess of cables from your PC, like SATA cables and power supply cables.

Figure 30: Cable holders.