Drive bays - optical drives
The front of the Cosmos is our next port of call. Behind the solid aluminium door and above the mesh front of the chassis are five externally accessible bays and they have mesh-covers, too.There is one thing we had to ask Cooler Master about here - why the mesh at the bottom is backed by a solid steel panel? The company's explanation actually made sense. The mesh is there for looks and having a sold plate behind it helps force air around the case without a loss of pressure - as we'll detail later on.
Those five bays mean that there's room for more than enough optical drives to satisfy most people's needs. Look closely and you'll see the pre-fitted converter that lets you fit a 3.5in drive into one of the 5.25in bays. That could be a floppy drive, a card reader or even an additional HDD.
Cooler Master has implemented a simple 'push-to-fit' locking mechanism for the front drive bays. Just slide a drive in from the front, push the button and you're done.
Believe it or not, the picture above shows one of the drives locked in place and others waiting for more optical goodness. Being a bit picky, it would have been nice if it were more obvious when a drive is fitted and locked in place but maybe that will come in a future iteration.
Just in case you hadn't realised - pushing one button really is all you have to do to lock an optical drive in place. There's no longer any need to have access to both sides of the drive. To our mind, that's a big bonus, both in terms of fitting drives and swapping one out for a newer, better-spec'd model.