The Cooler Master HAF X is not just a quick tweak of the 932 - it's a full on upgrade. The top of the case is all new, and the look and feel remaining similar but subtly changed from the HAF 922 and 932. The entire case is painted a nice scratch resistant, textured matte black and several new features have appeared.

Front Panel

For the HAF X, Cooler Master introduced a new latching cover design. It works very well, securely holding the cover and making it easy to pop out at the same time. Behind the blanks, the bays are masked off with metal blanks also, presumably to increase structural integrity when no optical or 5.25" bay sized devices are installed. These simply pop out with a little wiggling, and can be discarded.

HAF X Front Panel

HAF X Front Bay Blank

Drive Bays

A new addition for the HAF X is two SATA hot swap bays. Located at the bottom of the 5.25" bays, these two bays look just like normal. Sliding out the caddy is not very smooth and there is no locating latch to help insert or remove the caddies, but it works very well and is a simple and welcome addition.

Hot Swap SATA bays

The caddies have mounting locations for both 2.5" and 3.5" drives, so you can use your SSD, mobile hard drives or desktop SATA disks.

Hot Swap SATA caddy

Internally, the backplane has two SATA ports to connect to the motherboard, and a single Molex 4-pin power input. Preferably this would have been SATA style power input, as this would offer the 3.3v power line for low power modes as well.

Hot Swap SATA backplane

The internal 3.5" drive bays are the same as in the HAF 922 and 932, a nice latched snap-on tool-less caddy that mounts the drives sideways across the case. Another bonus here is a single included adapter for using the caddies with 2.5" drives. Hopefully additional adapters will be available from the Cooler Master store for a reasonable price.

Internal HD Caddys

The adapter snaps into the caddy easily. Screw the 2.5" device into the adapter using the side or bottom screw mounts, whichever your SSD/Mobile HD/Velociraptor/SAS drive works best with.

Internal 2.5-3.5 Adapter