Bitfenix Shinobi XL Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

The Bitfenix Shinobi XL has five 5.25” external bays, one 3.5” external bay converted from one of the 5.25” bays, and seven 3.5”/2.5” internal bays. The external 3.5” bay can be used by an internal 3.5” or 2.5” device. Installation of 5.25” and 3.5” devices can be done without the use of tools or screws, but you must use regular screws to install 2.5” devices.

Figure 15: Disk drive bays

The hard drive cage can be removed if you want to install video cards longer than 13.5” (344 mm) and/or install the second bottom fan and/or if you want to improve the case’s internal airflow. However, in doing so, you are left with only one bay for installing a hard drive or SSD: the 3.5”/2.5” bay that was converted from a 5.25” bay. Because of that, we don’t think the option of removing the hard drive cage is very practical. We’d prefer that, instead of having a single cage, this case had two hard drive cages. This way you could remove only the top or the bottom cage, depending on what you want to do, and still have a substantial number of bays available.

Figure 16: Case with the disk drive cage removed

Each 3.5”/2.5” bay is actually a small drawer, as you can see in Figure 17. The pegs that hold 3.5” devices have rubber rings to reduce vibration and absorb noise.

Figure 17: One of the 3.5”/2.5” bays

In Figure 18, you can see the adapter to convert one of the 5.25” bays into a 3.5” or 2.5” bay.

Figure 18: The 5.25” adapter