Bringing Out The Inner Case:
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The picture of the XClio 1000 on the right shows the inside of the case with the rail running through the middle being the power supply mount. This placement of the power supply kind of puzzled me as there is a lot of room between the top of the power supply and the top of the case. The only reason I could figure for this was for either a liquid cooling set up albeit a small one, or strictly for air flow purposes from the top 5.25" mounts. The right shot has a picture of the "SMART drive bays" and the standard 5.25 drive bays with punch outs. These punch outs are secured with screws from the front and are a bit frustrating to put in, but are pretty easy to take out. One hitch I ran into was on the hard drive bays, they only come out from the front and in order to do that you need to remove all the punch outs, this can be very irritating once you have the machine full as screws seem to enjoy jumping down the front of the other panels in the front. If you enjoy hide and seek then you will probably enjoy find the screw while installing drives. As a side note the cables you see in the pictures are the front panel connections to your motherboard as well as the 4 pin Molex power cable.
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This picture taken from XClio's web site shows a better view of the SMART drive bays that they have chosen to use. These bays can hold four drives and takes up two 5.25" bays. Each drive is snapped into a plastic carrier which in turn slides into the Smart bay itself. The cables are fed either directly to the mother board or routed through the back The issue I had was with accessing the bays themselves. Each 5.25" bay is secured by both a screw in plate and a clip in plastic face plate. The face plate comes off easily but getting at the screws to remove the metal screw in the EMF plates was a bit of a pain because they are recessed within the case. When the screws are removed they tend to fall down the front bezel of the case. This results in the game of "hide and seek" that I mentioned previously in this review. I am pleased to report that this case does not appear to have the sharp edges that accompanied the Thermaltake Kandalf case we reviewed not too long ago. The resulting lack of a tetanus shot pleased me immensely .
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