Features:
When I first had the opportunity to review the CFP51 I wasn't expecting it to be anything mind blowing, after all, what drive bay adapter is? Let me tell you, from the minute I took it out of the package I suddenly had the feeling this was much more.

Let me introduce you to the Silverstone CFP51. It is a drive bay adapter that takes up the space of three 5.25" drive bays in your computer, and inside it, allows you to mount up to four regular 3.5" hard drives Behind the front bezel is a 120mm blue LED cooling fan to prevent the cluster of drives from overheating. When you mount 4 hard drives together in one area they do get quite hot, and having this fan makes the drives run cooler than if they would be normally mounted in the regular bays of your case without a fan directly behind them. This is a great benefit already. Although this fan has a 3-pin connector stock, which makes it easy to monitor the RPM and control it with a fan controller, an adapter is also included to plug it into a standard 4-pin molex connector.

The first thing I saw that impressed me was how the mounting system works. If you look in the pictures below you can see detachable side brackets. These brackets provide the mounting between this drive enclosure and the 5.25" bays of your computer case. These brackets have 4 pins on each side that slide into the 4 black rubber grommets (as shown below). So essentially, the drive enclosure "floats" between the two mounting brackets and the 8 rubber grommets. Anyone into silent computing knows what this means, less vibrations get transferred from the hard drives to the case and essentially things operate quieter.

In the front, between the cage and fancy plastic bezel there's a 120mm fan, as I mentioned earlier. This fan runs at a rated speed of 1200rpm and a rather quiet 21dBa. To make things look cool, it's also a blue LED fan as well. When I popped the bezel off, I was surprised to see the attention to detail, even on something that will probably never get seen. The fan has a shiny fan grill mounted on the front and both the fan and grill are secured to the enclosure using a toolless mounting pin through each hole.

Behind the fan on the inside, as you can see in the picture below, there is a few metal strips with holes in at the front of each bay. To better the airflow of the fan, these just snap right out thus eliminating turbulance and increasing airflow.

Of course there is also a huge bag of screws provided to install all your hard drives into the CFP51.

Installation:
Installation went without a hitch, as expected. Remember this unit takes up three full 5.25" drive bays, so make sure you have the room for it along with any other 5.25" bay devices you probably have already! Most people with a standard tower case will probably have 4 - 5.25" drive bays. Also assuming that all you really need is a single DVD-RW drive, you are now a prime candidate to install the Silverstone CFP51. Now you have a fan cooled area to add more hard drives and increase your storage space, and who doesn't want to do that with the low price of hard drives nowadays.

You'll want to be careful if you're running a case with a door though, since the front bezel does protrude a little. I could only put it in the top 3 bays of my NZXT case because the door near the bottom wasn't as hollowed and would hit the front if it was installed there. No problem though because this case has 5 bays, so I just moved my 2 burners to the bottom 2 bays and installed the Silverstone CFP51 at the top - easy.
If this is a problem for you, the only other option is to remove the black bezel all together which can easily be done. However, now you've defeated the great looks of it and you essentially just have a grilled fan at the front of your case where this is mounted.