Design

MEGA 180 test system

Note the reflective mirror finish

Visually, MSI’s MEGA 180 chassis looks stunning. Gone is the downright ugly silver and orange chassis featured on the MEGA 651. It has been replaced with a black and blue scheme, giving the MEGA 180 a very distinctive look that will fit right in with the rest of the A/V components on your home theater rack, a task which the MEGA 651 just couldn’t accomplish.

For added flair, MSI has added a mirror finish to the MEGA 180’s front plate, giving the front of the chassis reflective properties. You’ll also notice that the 3.5” floppy drive bay has been replaced by a 6-in-1 card reader. This is an optional feature that is found on Deluxe MEGA 180 models, so if you’d rather populate that space with a floppy, you can remove the card reader. Considering the added capacity of today’s Compact Flash, Memory Stick, and Secure Digital cards though, we can’t imagine why anyone would want to do this (remember, there’s no Serial ATA or RAID driver to install for the MEGA 180, so no need for a floppy for your Windows XP install).

At the top of the chassis lies the 5.25” drive bay. The drive bay itself is covered by a spring-loaded door, this is a feature first introduced to the SFF world with MSI’s original MEGA-651. Unlike bay doors on other SFF systems, the door on the MEGA 180 is tied to the IDE interface. This means when you press the eject button on the MEGA’s front panel (or within Windows or the system’s bundled remote), the door to your CD or DVD drive opens, pushing down the MEGA 180’s drive bay door and revealing the drive’s tray. Press the eject button again and the drive closes, closing the MEGA drive bay door as well.

6-in-1 card reader

On other SFF systems with bay doors, the eject button is physically tied to the CD/DVD drive’s eject button, so it must make physical contact with the drive’s eject button in order to open/close the drive. Drive placement is critical in these SFF systems, if you don’t place the drive at the right distance and angle, the eject button won’t get enough pressure to work properly. It can sometimes be a frustrating experience finding this sweet spot.

Thanks to MSI’s IDE eject button implementation, this hassle isn’t necessary. When you press the eject button, you know the drive will open or close properly 100% of the time, even when the system is powered off and running in Hi-Fi mode (which we’ll discuss on the next page). This is just another example of MSI’s attention to detail with the MEGA 180.

Unfortunately like other bay door systems, MSI’s system isn’t compatible with all optical drives; some drive tray faces are just too large to work properly. MSI provides a list of compatible drives, but unfortunately the list is only populated with optical drives manufactured by MSI! We threw Mitsumi and Teac drives in the MEGA 180 with no problems, so we think most drives should work with the MEGA 180’s drive bay door.