A Closer Look - Inside

To open the A380, just remove a single screw. You may then pull off the top cover. It would have been nice to see it being secured by two screws, so it would not have any play.


The front of the device is meant for the drives. The left holds the single optical drive bay, while the right is intended for the hard drive cage. It can hold two hard drives and has been placed on rubber rings to reduce any vibration - a nice touch. Both of these cages need to be removed to install any drives.


Taking a closer look at the front I/O from the inside. Glacialtech has placed the traditional connections on a separate PCB, while the card reader has its own board. This means that one of your internal USB mainboard header is taken by these two parts. Glacialtech has secured the front with various screws and bent pieces of metal. Oddly, all of these metal pieces were loose and one is missing a screw. After tightening the remaining ones, the front did not budge at all.


The two earlier mentioned fans use blue LEDs and have both mainboard and Molex plugs. So you have complete choice of how to connect them. They are fairly small and probally do not push a lot of air.

The Power Supply

The power supply is quite compact and only has a single fan on the rear. As you can clearly see, it is 80 Plus certified and can handle up to 275W. This may not sound like much, but it is certainly enough to power any HTPC based mainboard with a dual core CPU as well as a few drives.