Installation

Let’s take a look inside, and run through the installation process.

The plastic drive trays seemed a bit flimsy, but installing a pair or Raptors in two of them was no problem. They then locked securely into the bays in the case, with a lever/catch mechanism.

Behind these four drive bays is a PCB into which you plug your SATA cables. Jumpers control which of the four drives is “active”, and there are headers to attach failure signaling cables for controllers supporting that feature. Oddly, the entire assembly is powered by two four pin molex connectors, so if you use the removable drive bays for all your SATA drives, you’ll end up with a lonely handful of SATA power plugs. Plus, if your power supply has a balanced mixture of SATA and molex plugs, you might find yourself running short…I used every single molex, something I can never remember doing.

Once the appropriate jumpers are set, and drives are installed, a plastic fan housing snaps over the rear of the hot swap assembly. The included 92mm fan is quiet, and does a very good job pulling fresh air across the drives through an attractive chrome grill in the case door. Fresh and dusty air, that is - there is no filtration provided, nor any easy means of adding it.

Motherboard installation was a breeze, as the back plate had standoffs pre-installed, which matched up perfectly with the mounting holes in my Asus i975 setup. The 930 also features screwless drive installation, which I had never worked with before. Drives installed securely and easily with the locking mechanism pictured below, erasing any doubts I had about the concept.

For floppy installation, an adapter was provided to fit a 3 ½ inch drive into one of the exposed 5 ¼ drive bays, but only one. Unfortunately, any older PATA drives would be left out in the cold without purchasing additional drive adaptors, a situation I can imagine catching end users by surprise.