Installation and Operation:
While I don't have a 7" LCD monitor to install in the SwordM, I did take the 5.25 to 7 inch adaptor out in order to install an optical drive in one of these bays. The image below shows the gaping hole left with the adaptor out, which is held in by two thumbscrews found at the back of the drive bay. Two 7 inch wide bay covers are included in case you want to leave the adaptor out, but don't want the front of your case left wide open.
All of the drive bay covers pop out easily by simply pulling on a lip found on either side. You can remove / replace any of them from the outside of the case without tools, which is a nice touch. The below right image shows a drive installed and the 7 inch drive bay adaptor ready to be slid back into the case.
While you could use some of the included thumbscrews to mount an optical drive in any of the lower bays, up here you need to use standard screws (also included), in order to fit into the tighter space and to get through a thicker piece of Aluminum.
The cables for the SwordM are shown below, and they should be long enough to reach anywhere on your motherboard. You have your typical front panel connections, as well as a bright red, heavy duty SATA cable connected to the eSATA port on the front of the case.
The installation wound up taking a slightly different path than was initially planned, and the design of the SwordM definitely played a major role in that. The next set of images will take a look at the actual installation, while some of the positives and negatives are discussed.
The images below show a mATX motherboard installed with a dual slot PCI Express graphics card, a PCI wireless card, a PCI SATA drive adaptor, a 5.25 inch bay device for four 3.5 inch SATA drives, a DVDRW, a stand alone SATA drive, and an ATX power supply. These were not the components I intended to use in this review, but as installed, everything went in fairly well.
