SilverStone Raven RV02 Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

Officially this case has five external 5.25” bays, but if you remove the hard disk drive cage (which is fastened to the chassis using eight thumbscrews) you gain three more 5.25” bays for a total of eight. One of the 5.25” bays can be converted into a 3.5” bay using the included adapters, which support both external (floppy disk drives, memory card readers, etc) and internal (i.e., hard disk drives) devices. This way if you remove the hard disk drive cage you can still install one hard drive in one of the 5.25” bays. Or you can install one 2.5” hard disk drive or SSD, as this case features an adapter for installing 2.5” devices on the left side of the 5.25” disk drive bays.

Figure 17: 2.5” “bay.”

This case has screwless mechanisms for holding only four 5.25” devices: the top 5.25” bay doesn’t come with this system installed, so you will have to use regular screws if you install an optical drive on the top bay.

Figure 18: The top 5.25” bay doesn’t come with a screwless retention mechanism.

The hard disk drive cage only holds three 3.5” hard disk drives, being the number one drawback from this case. You need to install screws to hold the hard disk drives, but the advantage here is that the bays use rubber shock absorbers to reduce the noise produced by the hard disk drives. Differently from Raven RV01, RV02 does not come with hot-swap connectors for hard disk drives.

Figure 19: Hard disk drive cage. Notice the rubber supports.