A system and apparatus are described for removably mounting one or more hard disk drives within a computer system. According to one embodiment, the system includes an enclosure configured to receive a disk drive carrier cage, a disk drive backplane, a disk drive controller, and a power supply. The system also includes a disk drive backplane for receiving hard disk drives, disk drive carriers for holding the hard disk drives, and disk drive carrier rails mountable within the disk drive carrier cage for slidably receiving the disk drive carriers. The disk drive carriers and disk drive carrier rails are translucent thereby permitting light emanating from the backplane to be viewed at the front of the cage. The disk drive controller provides a disk drive interface between the disk drive backplane and a host computer system.