Drive Bays and Installation:
In the P190 there is room to install:
- 6 x 3.5” Hard Drives
- 1 x 3.5” Floppy Drive
- 4 x 5.25” Drives
All of the 5.25” drives are installed with drive slides, as is common place in Antec cases and many others these days, there are also drive slides for two hard drives to go in the upper 3.5” bay, however instead of the drive slides screwing into the sides of the drives, the drives screw into a sliding drive carriage with anti-noise grommets around the screw holes.
One thing that is missing with all the drive bays that utilise drive slides in the P190 is the ability to secure them in with a bolt or screw, to stop them coming loose in transit and bouncing freely over the motherboard and video cards, having worked in computer stores that shipped built custom systems, I’ve seen it happen more than once, including with Antec cases. The ability to add just one screw, or some form of secondary restraint would save a lot of potential damage.
Under the top 3.5” hard drive bay is a single bay for a 3.5” floppy drive, it could potentially be used for another hard drive, but as it uses drive slides which slide in from the front of the case and don’t go very far back, your hard drive might end up sticking out the front of the case a bit, not really the best look.
The drive cage in the bottom of the case can house another 4 x 3.5” hard drives, which don’t use drive slides this time, and instead screw into the cage itself, again with all screws going through anti-noise grommets. This bottom drive cage, along with the top one, leave a great deal of room between the drives to allow air to move through and keep the drives cool, which will in turn have them lasting longer.
Both hard drive bays can be removed completely to aid with installation, actually the bottom ones can’t be installed at all without taking it out. Once a thumb screw is removed from each of them, the cages can be pulled out via the little ring on the side and you can install your drive(s). Once you’re done, pop them back in, replace the thumb screw and be sure to secure the ring into its holder so it doesn’t rattle around, it’s nice to know Antec think of the little things like that, cause if that was rattling it would annoy the crap out of me.
