Silverstone Lascala LC20M HTPC case

You could practically live in here

With the lid off, you can start to get a feel for the size of system that could be comfortably built in here. There are two 5.25" bays and a 3.25" bay with external access, as well as six internal hard drive bays, though the internal layout is slightly difference from the SilverStone LC16M we reviewed in February. That means up to 4.5TB of info if you were using half a dozen of the latest 750GB drives. You could keep a lot of torrents on that, assuming you still had money to pay your ISP bill after buying the drives. The case can house a full ATX or micro ATX motherboard, but note that no other form factors are able to be mounted without considerable modification.

Each of the drive bays is secured by two screws underneath the lip, and the middle one is given two other screws via the cross-bar. Remove these screws and each bay slides out, and you can see that they latch into place on the bottom of the frame. The 3.5" external bay is the only one that cannot be removed. The crossbar can also be taken off for assembly.

The two HDD bays have brackets on the front of them for mounting 92mm fans, which correspond to circular plates that you can see pictured in the front of the case body. These plates are able to be removed to allow cooling fans for the drives, though I found that removing them was not as easy as it should be. One would normally simply rock the metal back and forth until it snaps loose, but I found I actually needed to get out tin snips to remove the plates.

If you choose to place fans here, they pull air up through the vents on the bottom of the bezel, so it would be important to not set the unit on carpet if you do. In fact, if using these, I would not recomment the unit be within about a foot of your floor, so you don't accidentally 'vacuum' the area near there, picking up pet hair, dustballs, and whatever else might be lurking about.


Finally, you can see the giant mess of cables that constitute the front panel of the unit. The VFD is three of them, including the thick, black USB cable. This cable is long enough to be run under the unit and out one of the expansion slots, to connect to a USB port in the back of the motherboard. They also kindly provide an internal header, but I'll discuss the convenience of that in our assembly section. Speaking of, let's get to that now.