Antec Twelve Hundred Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

 As mentioned, this case has twelve external 5.25” bays. On the default configuration the case uses three hard disk
drive cages, each one taking three 5.25” bays, so in fact we have three 5.25” bays and nine 3.5” bays for hard disk drives available. This case comes with a 5.25”-to-3.5” adapter, so if you won’t use a floppy disk drive you can have up to 10 hard disk drives installed, which is more than enough even for the most hardcore user.

Figure 13: Disk drive bays, inside view.

If you need more 5.25” bays you can remove the hard disk drive cages. In fact you can remove all of them to make the twelve 5.25” bays available. In this extreme configuration you can use one of them to install your hard disk drive through the 5.25”-to-3.5” adapter, leaving eleven 5.25” bays to be used.

The cages are fastened to the 5.25” bays through the use of thumbscrews and even though on the factory configuration the cages come installed on the lowest nine bays nothing prevents you from moving them around. For example, you can move one of the cages to the top three 5.25” bays if you’d like to have this configuration for some reason.

Unfortunately this case doesn’t come with any screwless mechanism for installing optical or hard disk drives and it also doesn’t come with thumbscrews, so you have to use regular screws to install disk drives. Hard disk drives must use longer screws that come with the case.

Each hard disk drive cage comes with a 120 mm fan attached (each one with an individual speed control knob, as shown in Figure 4) but if you think you need even more ventilation on certain hard disk drives or simply more airflow inside the case one of the cages come with a plastic stand for you to install an extra 120 mm fan, which doesn’t come with the case.

Figure 14: Hard disk drive cage.

Figure 15: Hard disk drive cage.

Each cage also comes with a washable dust filter, which is great.

Figure 16: Washable dust filter.