Since we have the side panel off, lets take a little closer look inside the enclosure. We see a fairly generic layout, but there are some features that bear mentioning in this model.
Starting with the optical drive bays we see that each level has tabs to help keep the drive aligned during installation. While this may seem basic, if you take a look at many of the cases coming out nowadays, you’ll see that this doesn’t hold true for many of the models currently available.
The wiring you see toward the top is the cabling from the top mounted I/O ports. While not a real inconvenience, you’ll want to take a little care if you use the top drive bay to make sure you don’t crimp any if the wiring during drive installation. This can potentially cause future problems of electrical shorts if you are careless.
This particular model uses a new type of drive retention setup that I’ve not come across before. There are many tool-free drive systems out right now, but this one uses a plastic key with a central locking device that turns 90 degrees to lock or unlock the drive. Simply twist the central lock 90 degrees to the left to unlock, and the reverse to lock it back into place.
This is a closer look at the locking device. The two pins along the edges fit through the side of the drive bay and lock into the standard screw holes on your optical drive. It was a simple and effective means to secure the drive into the bay and once locked into place, there was no movement of the drive at all. This is a concept that I could get used to.
Going down the drive tower brings us to the two removable 3.5” drive bays. While there is no tool-free mechanism for the smaller drives in the system, the ability to remove the bay makes installation of these devices a lot easier. To remove the bays, just push in on the silver tab for each bay and it slides out easily. Installing it back into place is just as easy and you do not have to push in the lock to insert it fully into place.
Tucked in behind the bottom drive bay is an 80mm fan mount, but again there is no fan that comes mounted here. If you’ve been keeping track, there is only a single 80mm fan that comes with this unit and that is the side mounted one. If you decide to mount one (yes, this is recommended), you’ll be able to make good use of it since the fan sits behind the vented mouth mentioned earlier.
To keep things at a certain level of convenience, SANSUN has made use of a slider-type PCI retention brace that allows you to install peripheral cards in a simple manner. Once the card is in place, you just lower the appropriate slider to lock the board into place.
This is a bit closer look at how the system works. Pretty straightforward as a whole.
