Lian Li PC-7F Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

This case has five external 5.25” bays and one of them comes with an adapter for installing a 3.5” device, which can be a floppy disk drive, a memory card reader or a hard disk drive (the adapter has all the necessary holes).Only the two top 5.25” bays use screwless mechanisms.

Figure 9: Disk drive bays.

The hard disk drive bays are the highlight of this case. Each bay is a removable aluminum drawer that uses an anti-vibration mechanism to prevent the natural vibration produced by the hard disk drives from being propagated to the chassis. As you can see in Figure 10, the front 140 mm fan is in charge of cooling down the hard disk drives.

Figure 10: Hard disk drive bays.

Each drawer has a big plastic latch on top to lock the hard drive in place. If you don’t feel secure with this mechanism you can add one screw to each side of the drawer to fasten the hard drive. In this case the drawer won’t be a screwless system anymore, of course.

Figure 11: Hard disk drive drawer.

The number of hard disk drive bays – four – is more than sufficient for the average user, but high-end users may need more bays. If this is your case you will need to look for a different (and more expensive) product.

Since you can use the adapter that comes in the lower 5 1/4" bay to install a hard disk drive you can have up to five hard disk drives with this case, if you don’t have an external 3.5” devic
e, of course.