SilverStone Grandia GD06 Case Review

The Front Panel

The front panel of the SilverStone Grandia GD06 has an aluminum door, featuring a lock to prevent unauthorized people from removing your hard drives, inserting or removing discs, or installing USB devices. Of course, the top panel also has an anti-theft device, otherwise someone could simply bypass the front door protection by opening the case.

Figure 3: Front door

Opening the front door, we have two hot-swap 3.5” hard drive bays (not compatible with 2.5” devices) on the left, a standard 5.25” bay on the right, two USB 3.0 ports, the reset button, and the traditional audio jacks. The standby (a.k.a. on/off) switch is located at the bottom part of the front panel, and it is not covered by the door.

The USB 3.0 ports use a front panel connector instead of the traditional USB plugs. This way, you can install them directly on your motherboard instead of having to route the cables to the outside of the case, and install them on USB 3.0 ports located at the motherboard rear panel. The GD06 comes with an adapter to convert the internal USB 3.0 connector into a standard USB 2.0 header, so you can still use the USB 3.0 ports as USB 2.0 ports in case your motherboard doesn’t have a USB 3.0 front panel header.

Figure 4: Front panel

Figure 5: The two hot-swap 3.5” bays

Figure 6: The 5.25” bay, reset button, and connectors