NZXT Khaos Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

This case has a total of eleven 5.25” bays. On the default configuration six of them are used by two hard disk drive cages, each cage holding up to four hard disk drives, for a total of eight hard disk drives. If you keep this configuration, you can have up to five optical drives and eight hard disk drives, or four optical drives, one floppy disk drive and eight (or nine, if you don’t have a floppy disk drive) hard disk drives, if you use the 5.25”-to-3.5” adapter that comes with the product.

If you want more 5.25” bays – for example, for installing a water cooling system – you can simply remove one of the hard disk drive cages, assuming that you don’t have more than four hard disk drives, of course.

Figure 13: The eleven 5.25” bays.

This case doesn’t use any screwless mechanism to fasten drives to the bays and it also doesn’t come with thumbscrews for fastening the drives in the bays. We think that a case from this price range should come with at least lots of thumbscrews.

In order to install optical drives you need to remove the case front panel, which is done by unscrewing six regular screws. You also need to remove this panel in order to remove the hard disk drive cages from the unit. The two top bays come with “fake” covers for your optical drives, so your optical drive will have an aluminum façade.

Figure 14: Front cover removed from the case.

Figure 15: Case without its front cover and hard disk drive cages.

Pay attention on Figures 14 and 15 and you will see that from the third to the eleventh bay the bays are grouped in groups of three bays. The two hard disk drive cages come installed on the lower bays, but you can move one of them up to the group of bays made by the third, fourth and fifth bays. The 5.25” bays are also grouped for another reason: water cooling systems based on 5.25” bays usually take two or three 5.25” bays.

In Figure 16, you can see the two hard disk drive cages. Each cage has one 120 mm fan attached, glowing blue when it is turned on. See how each cage has a mesh attached. Between the mesh and the fan there is a washable dust filter. The only problem is removing this filter: you need to unscrew the mesh to have access.

Figure 16: Hard disk drive cages.