10-28-2012, 10:04 AM
Swapped my parts over into a different case yesterday, because the one I'd been eyeballing was on sale. Changed from an Antec Three Hundred to a Three Hundred Two.
Good things:
- Holy crap is the Three Hundred Two well-designed.
- Rotating the HDD bays, sliding the motherboard towards the back of the case a half inch, and flipping the power supply over by giving it an intake on the bottom make it have so much more room. And routing cables is so much easier.
- If I want to change my CPU cooler I don't have to demount the motherboard. Nice.
- And tool-less install of both 5.25" and 3.5" bays? I approve.
- USB3 on the front of the case, which is half the reason I bought the thing. Then I busted the USB3 header on my motherboard, so I have to demount it to repair it, but that's another story.
My gripes include:
- One of the 2.5" attachment points requires mounting the drive before mounting the motherboard. Also means you can't remove the drive after the motherboard is in.
- The tool-less setup for the 3.5" bays renders nearly all 2.5"->3.5" converters useless. Rilnac's trick of abusing the 5.25" bays to mount up to four 2.5" drives by using two screws each doesn't work because of the tool-less setup for those bays as well. You MUST use the two 2.5" attachment points, or spend hours modifying your 2.5"->3.5" converters and the tool-less rails.
- The distribution of the drives is good (they're close enough you can comfortably connect your drives together and have a little slack on the power cables), but for my PSU, I only have 2x4 SATA power connectors (two cables with four connectors each). This case has six 3.5" bays, two 2.5" points, and four 5.25" bays (of which I'm using four, two, and two, respectively). It made routing power difficult, although two single-drive Molex->SATA power adapters ended up saving the day.
- I now have more drives/eSATA connection points than I have SATA connections on my motherboard. This is so much less of a problem than it used to be with IDE that I'm not sure why I'm bitching about it.
Good things:
- Holy crap is the Three Hundred Two well-designed.
- Rotating the HDD bays, sliding the motherboard towards the back of the case a half inch, and flipping the power supply over by giving it an intake on the bottom make it have so much more room. And routing cables is so much easier.
- If I want to change my CPU cooler I don't have to demount the motherboard. Nice.
- And tool-less install of both 5.25" and 3.5" bays? I approve.
- USB3 on the front of the case, which is half the reason I bought the thing. Then I busted the USB3 header on my motherboard, so I have to demount it to repair it, but that's another story.
My gripes include:
- One of the 2.5" attachment points requires mounting the drive before mounting the motherboard. Also means you can't remove the drive after the motherboard is in.
- The tool-less setup for the 3.5" bays renders nearly all 2.5"->3.5" converters useless. Rilnac's trick of abusing the 5.25" bays to mount up to four 2.5" drives by using two screws each doesn't work because of the tool-less setup for those bays as well. You MUST use the two 2.5" attachment points, or spend hours modifying your 2.5"->3.5" converters and the tool-less rails.
- The distribution of the drives is good (they're close enough you can comfortably connect your drives together and have a little slack on the power cables), but for my PSU, I only have 2x4 SATA power connectors (two cables with four connectors each). This case has six 3.5" bays, two 2.5" points, and four 5.25" bays (of which I'm using four, two, and two, respectively). It made routing power difficult, although two single-drive Molex->SATA power adapters ended up saving the day.
- I now have more drives/eSATA connection points than I have SATA connections on my motherboard. This is so much less of a problem than it used to be with IDE that I'm not sure why I'm bitching about it.