SilverStone Raven RV03 Case Review

The Disk Drive Bays

The SilverStone Raven RV03 comes with seven external 5.25” bays, and six of them are also used as internal 3.5” bays. It also has four internal 3.5” bays behind the motherboard tray, making the RV03 support up to 10 3.5” hard drives, which is really impressive. It also has two 2.5” bays behind the motherboard tray.

Figure 25: The 5.25”/3.5” disk drive bays

Figure 26: Disk drive bays behind the motherboard tray

Installing drives on the Raven RV03 can be a painful process. There are only two bays that you can use without having to disassemble parts: the top-most 5.25” bay, since this one doesn’t have a 3.5” bay inside, and one of the 3.5” bays available behind the motherboard tray (the one on the upper right corner). For installing devices in the 5.25”/3.5” bays you have to remove the front panel and remove a bunch of screws in order to remove the hard drive cage (there are two hard drive cages, each one taking up three 5.25” bays), while for installing devices in the 3.5” or 2.5” bays behind the motherboard tray you must remove the bay from the case, which involves unscrewing regular screws.

Figure 27: One of the hard drive cages removed from the case

You need to use regular screws to fasten 3.5” and 2.5” devices, but the 3.5” bays have rubber rings to absorb vibration and, thus, reduce the amount of noise produced by the hard drives.