Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

Cooler Master CM 690 II comes with four 5.25” bays feature a very easy to use screwless retention mechanism. As mentioned, the original CM 690 has five 5.25” bays.

Figure 15: 5.25” bays.

The reviewed case comes with six 3.5” bays for hard disk drives, separated in two cages. The top cage holds two bays and is permanently attached to the chassis. The bottom cage holds four bays and you can remove it if you want to install a second fan on the bottom panel, a radiator for liquid cooling solutions on the bottom panel or if you just want a higher airflow and have only one or two hard drives.

Figure 16: 3.5” bays.

Figure 17: Case with the bottom cage removed.

You can install an optional 120 mm fan on the left side of the hard disk drive cages. Like it happens with the front fan, you can choose between installing it aligned with the top bays or with the bottom bays.

Each 3.5” bay is actually a little drawer. The pegs the hold each hard drive have a rubber piece to absorb the hard drive vibration, thus preventing the noise generated by the hard drive from propagating to the chassis.

The Advanced model comes with an adapter to allow the installation of two 2.5” or 1.8” devices (mostly SSD units) on any 3.5” bay. This adapter is the device on the left-hand side from Figure 18.

Figure 18: SSD adapter (available only on the Advanced version) and one of the 3.5” little drawers.

This case comes with brackets that allows the conversion of any 5.25” into an external 3.5” bay, in order for you to install a floppy disk drive or a memory card reader.

In Figure 19, you can see all the accessories that come with the Advanced version.

Figure 19: Accessories that come with the Advanced version from CM 690 II.