Bgears b-Envi Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

As mentioned this case has two external 5.25” bays, on external 2.5” bay for a removable hard disk drive enclosure and two internal 3.5” bays.

Figure 11: External 5.25” and 2.5” bays.

Figure 12: Internal 3.5” bays.

Unfortunately this case doesn’t use anti-vibration mechanisms for the hard disk drive, which is a desirable feature for home theater PCs.

In Figure 13 we show the hard disk drive enclosure that comes with the case. It is targeted to 2.5” parallel ATA (PATA) laptop hard disk drives – pay attention because you can easily find 2.5” SATA hard disk drives around. Bgears sells a printed circuit board for SATA hard drives for USD 9.99 (or USD 15.99 if you want the full enclosure instead of just the printed circuit board). Three and a half-inch (i.e., desktop) units don’t fit the enclosure.

Externally the enclosure is connected to the PC using a USB port (both PATA and SATA versions), so you can’t use this enclosure to hold your main hard disk drive, only a data hard disk. The case comes with a USB cable to allow you to install your data hard disk drive to any PC as an external device.

Figure 13: Hard disk drive enclosure.

Figure 14: Hard disk drive enclosure.