Going Inside

Besides looks, there aren't too many things that can set cases apart from each other. One of those things is how the drive bays are handled; let's have a look at the CDROM bays:

There are four external 5.25" bays, and 2 external 3.5" bays (we'll get to the internal HDD bays in a bit). If you look at the opposite side of the bays, you'll see that there are no clips; this is because you only need one clip per drive, which clips onto the left side of the drive/case (when looking straight on).

The drive tabs are cleverly installed in an enclosure below the HDD bays. To remove them, you pull the ring on the right side, which unlocks all the tabs. They clip onto the drives easily, and without the need for tools. The single-clip design allows CasEdge to include enough tabs for all four 5.25" bays and two 3.5" bays. Bonus!

Now, onto the HDD bays

There's enough room for four HDD's, and they are installed in a 'cords-out' direction, which has its positives and negatives. On the positive side, it makes cable installation a lot easier, but unfortunately it makes things extra messy. And unfortunately, there is no way for us to switch the drive around so the cables are on the other side. For one, the drive bay design doesn't allow for it, and even if it did, we aren't able to take the other door off to install and arrange cables! DOH!

Where are the tabs to install the hard drives? Just a bit to the left:

These two brackets screw onto the drive, and from there you simply slide the drive into the bays you saw above. The screws themselves are what function as the tabs to keep the drive secure, so unfortunately there is no way out of using tools here.

While CasEdge did well to give us enough tabs to fill every single 5.25" and 3.5" bay, we are stuck with only two HDD brackets, and thus are limited to being able to install only two HDD's in the case out of the box. I guess you might be able to just use the screws that work as tabs, and forego the handles, but I wouldn't want to try ripping the drives out without a handle - you know how fragile hard drives can be!

With many users having RAID setups and several ter's of...files... it is very important that we are able to install as many drives as possible right out of the box, without having to specially order extra brackets and such.