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It’s very easy to use and once you removed the bottom three, you can remove the hard drive cage which holds a 120mm cooling fan, the same as at the back. To cool the hard drives. The hard drives are than fastened with regular screws that go through the large holes in the cage and your set to move the cage back into place.

Mind you, there is very little room once you installed your hard drives into the cage. I actually placed the hard drive cage in the middle of the case because the video card im using sticks out too much. In case your using a larger video card than you seriously do not have any room to occupy those bottom drive spots!

The M9D is a nice addition to the large variety of cases that Thermaltake have to offer. But although it looks great from the outside, there are still some flaws in it’s design if you have a system crammed full of drives and video cards. For starters the case should have been a bit deeper to use all of the drive spots with larger video cards, secondly there are the noisy fans. You might also not want to use a large heat sink for your cpu because there is little to no room between the 23cm fan and the heatsink if you have a larger than normal fan. Another issue is the harddrive bracket, if you put any hdd’s in there than there’s not a lot of clearance between the rest of the hardware and the drives. Same for the room on the bottom where you can install drives, there’s just not enough room if your using larger cards. The fastening system for the drives however is a dream to work with and the overall feel and quality of this case is right up there with the other cases of this segment. Tough decisions, but if you don’t use a lot of hardware and you want a stylish case than this is not a bad choice at all.

Final Verdict

• Looks great from the outside
• Large fan on the side that is rather quiet, but might interfere with hardware.
• The case is, as far as I can tell free from vibrations coming from drives.
• The case is not expensive and great value for money
• The PCI fastening system doesn’t really hold the cards tight enough
• Tool free drive installation which works excellent
• The entire bottom section for drive mounting is unusable when you have a large video card
• The included fans are somewhat noisy and there is no way to turn them down, other than buying a fan controller