Internal Appearance
With the outside taken care of, we removed the lid and dived in to see if any clever design ideas could be found inside.If we could assume one thing before we opened the X11 up, it’s that there would be plenty of room inside and sure enough we weren’t disappointed.
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We previously mentioned the space for a single optical drive and 3.5” floppy/media drive, but to our surprise there are 4 x 3.5” extra bays available inside. One can be mounted atop the optical bay space; the other three have something special up their sleeve.
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Behind the power button and VFD sits a standalone HDD caddy that allows three 3.5” devices to be mounted vertically, dampened by the pre-fitted rubber grommets.
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The HDD caddy itself looks to be floating at first glance, but is, in fact, mounted on stand-offs over an 80mm fan, extracting heat from the fitted HDDs straight through vents in the chassis floor.
Whilst this idea is by no-means new, it does suffer from something fundamental – vibration.
The RPM speed of the fan is too high to avoid it and the noise from the floor of the chassis was both noticeable and irritating.
