Silverstone Tek Aluminum 3.5-Inch Drive Bay with USB 3.0X4 and HD Audio Ports (FP32B-E)

The product works great! I have no issues thus far. The audio ports work just fine and the USB 3.0 slots are working great! I will point out however, you will need 2 USB 3.0 headers on your motherboard otherwise it won’t work, or only half of it will work. (Depending on weather you have 0-1 USB 3.0 headers on your board.) In my case, I am only able to use half of the ports available on this product because I only have 1 USB 3.0 header on my motherboard. That said, as long as u have the right tower or drive bay converter to put this in and you have available headers on your motherboard, this product will work just fine for you.

I got this because I wanted a few more USB3 ports on the front of my case. My motherboard has 2 USB3 front panel headers and this allows me to utilize them.I just wish the cables were slightly longer. The front panel audio header on my motherboard is located near the rear of the board where the audio section is. This makes sense because you don't want to be running stuff across the board picking up noise from other areas. The audio cable on this barely reaches and only does so because I didn't route it behind the side panel. It makes things not as clean looking. Other than this problem it seems to be nicely built and has been working well.

I built a kick-butt Windows 7 Professional file server for backing up my home machines and my work external hard drives and flash drives. It had three USB 3 ports, but two were on top and the third was on the back. Since the machine sits on top of a 6' high safe, all the USB ports were difficult to access.I wanted true USB throughput, not a hub, so my research led me to the Silverstone Tek PCI Express Card Dual Internal USB 3.0 (ECU01). It screams, it is so fast, and since all four ports are independent, you can connect drives to all four ports at once and back them up simultaneously. YMMV -- doing so depends on the speed of your computer's bus. It comes with both standard and low-profile shield covers, too.You will, of course, need external ports for the four new USB 3 interfaces. The card does not have any external ports, but I found the Silverstone Tek 3.5-Inch Drive Bay 4 x USB 3 with HD Audio Ports (FP32B-E) kit. There you have it: four USB 3 ports, right on the front of your machine, with HD audio, if you need it (I didn't, for a server). Yes, it's $55 USD for the set, but in nine months they haven't caused me an instant of grief. I would recommend this set-up to anyone who wants to upgrade their desktop system.

I had to give this 3 stars (and that's being generous under the circumstances), because user intervention was required to fix a design fault before it worked correctly- this should not have been necessary; if not for this, I would have given it 5 stars.I have an older Cooler Master Praetorian case that I really like because it's made out of heavy gauge aluminum, held together with thumbscrews, and a motherboard tray that is easily removable with several thumbscrews. The only major downside was that it had only an AC97 front panel audio connection that is now largely unsupported, instead of the more common HD audio connection. It also had no USB 3.0 front panel connectors. There are almost no options when it comes to replacing these front panel connectors, and for the Praetorian, none that fit. I was a bit disappointed when I read the reviews for this Silverstone product because in "shave's" review it stated that the HD audio specification is not fully implemented in this panel. Having no other good options I ordered one of these panels to see for myself what the issues were and whether or not they could be rectified. Upon receipt, I compared the wiring of the panel to the HD audio specification in the "Intel Front Panel IO Connectivity Design Guide". Everything is correctly wired in the panel per the Intel HD audio specification EXCEPT as "shave" stated in his review, the wiring is not fully implemented in this panel for the "PRESENSE #" signal to the motherboard on pin 4 of the connector- that signal does not exist, even though on Silverstone's website a schematic of the connector shows it. This is disappointing.However if you're technically inclined, there is a solution, although it will require some skillful soldering. On examination of the Intel document mentioned above, the missing 'signal' at pin 4 is simply a connection to 'ground' through a 1k ohm (1000 ohm) resistor. There's negligible current draw, so a 1/4 watt or 1/10 watt resistor will work fine. I scavenged a connector contact and wire from one stripped from an old case that I discarded, and soldered one end of the resistor to one end of this wire with the contact at the other end, and other end of the resistor to a short piece of wire that is then connected to pin 2 of the Silverstone FP32B-E HD audio connector (black wire) which is the 'ground' connector to the motherboard (*** Please note! The exposed connections to the resistor and the resistor itself should be covered with a piece of heat-shrinkable tubing to prevent them from contacting anything on the motherboard and potentially causing damage!). Once that's done, the panel will function as it should and the motherboard will detect that it is plugged in and when a headset is plugged into the front panel it will mute the audio out from the rear panel as designed. Kudos to "shave" for pointing out this design fault. Silverstone REALLY needs to fix this, but I'm not holding my breath.

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