The Disk Drive Bays
Contents
This case has five external 5.25” bays, two external 3.5” bays and three internal 3.5” hard disk drive bays. Even thought the bottom external 3.5” bay is used to hold the connectors found on the front panel (so you can’t install a second external 3.5” device like memory card reader, unless you don’t mind removing these connectors), this bay can be used to install a hard disk drive. We tested and the two 3.5” external bays have enough space for installing a floppy disk drive and a hard disk drive at the same time and still pass the cables from the those connectors. So you can have up to four or five (if you don’t use an external 3.5” device like a floppy disk drive or a memory card reader) hard disk drives installed in this case.
All bays use screwless mechanisms to hold disk drives. The 5.25” and external 3.5” bays use a very good mechanism where you only need to slide a ruler to lock the drive in place (see Figure 10). For install hard drives in the hard disk drive cage, however, you need to install two rulers to each hard drive and then slide the drive into its bay. This mechanism works great.
But since the main goal from this case is to have a quiet PC, we think that it should have some sort of vibration-absorbing mechanisms for the hard disk drives.
Figure 10: Screwless mechanisms
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Figure 11: Hard disk drive cage.
The front fan is located in front of the hard disk drive cage, cooling down the hard drives located there.
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