Installing our optical drive proved to be simple also. The top-most bay does not have a steel retention plate installed, so we used that first. A black plastic bay guard covers each of the bays though, so we needed to access the front of the case to remove it. This involved opening the front access panel and unhooking the the bay guard by means of a convenient plastic tab. This was effortless.

The screwless 5.25 inch drive bays use a locking mechanism which sits on the left side of the bay. Pulling the lever to the unlocked symbol allowed us to slide our drive into the case. Once it was in position, a hard pull on the locking lever pushed metal tabs into the screw holes of the drive, locking it into place. While ASUS does warn that the drive should still be screwed in if you are travelling with the computer, this installation method is simple and will keep the drive more than secure as long as the case is not jostled around too much. If you want to screw the optical drives in normally, unlocking the mechanism gives you full access to the screw holes and screws are included with the case.

If you need to install more than one optical drive, the metal bay guards covering the other external bays need to be twisted off with a screwdriver or other metal lever. This process is as protracted and annoying as it has been with any other case we've ever used, though fortunately the edges of the metal guards are not that sharp.

The removable drive tray at the bottom of the drive stack holds a pair of 3.5 inch drives. It comes complete with four rubber vibration dampers for each hard drive, which is a great feature that we wish more case makers would emulate.

One thing we did notice was that the instruction in the manual for removing the hard drive bay appear to be incorrect. They show the bay being removed by pulling it towards the back of the case, while it really needs to be pulled towards the left side. This gave us a few moments of utter frustration until we figured it out (and thankfully we did not sever our fingers thanks to the rounded edges of the steel casing).

Putting the tray back into the case after adding our hard drive was a little harder than it needed to be also. It took us three or four tries to get right, and a not inconsiderable amount of force was needed to snap it into place. Compared to removable tray systems we've seen on other cases, this one is at best merely adequate.

Once everything was correctly hooked up, our last obstacle was restoring the side panel. This proved to be a bit harder than we'd thought due to the large air vent mounted to the inside of the panel. After a couple of minutes we got it on smoothly and set about wiring up the system.

The plastic cable organizer at the rear of the case allows you to bundle up excess cables neatly if you like, though we didn't have much use for this feature. The organizer is easily removable, so it's not a problem either way.