Creative Uses For Extra Drive Bays? 366
Posted
by
timothy
from the mousetrap-in-the-dark dept.
from the mousetrap-in-the-dark dept.
sheetsda writes "For many years now PC cases have included 3 or 4 or even more external 5.25 inch drive bays. These days with the proliferation of USB thumb drives and gigabit Ethernet, even my DVD drive has been gathering dust since OS-install-time. Before that when combination CD-RW and DVD drives were nonexistent or expensive that still leaves and extra drive bay or two. What exceptionally inventive, useful, or clever uses have the community found for this extra space? Bonus geek cred for solutions making use of the power rails inside the case."
More hard drives. (Score:4, Informative)
Three 5.25" drive bays above each other can hold a case with four 3.5" drive bays and a 120mm fan. Thermaltake sells them, as do zillions of other companies.
Re:Umm, more drives? (Score:3, Informative)
Water-cooling pumps (Score:1, Informative)
You can fit a water-cooling pump and controller system in a 5.25" drive bay.
Removable HDD Readers, displays or Ports (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.cremax.com/product_pagein.html [cremax.com]
They have SATA readers that do not even need a caddy. You can just pop a "naked" sata drive in and read it. These days drives have gotten so cheap (and many of us have so many extra ones lying around) that they can be used as removable storage. They have IDE drive readers too. Usually the drive needs to be mounted in a caddy for those. Of course, IDE hard drives are more or less obsolete, but some of us still have a pile of them that are still perfectly good.
Of course you can add extra ports too. USB hubs, firewire ports etc etc. If you want a lot of configuration, check out this site: http://frontx.com/ [frontx.com]
You can build your own combination of USB, Firewire, audio, video and other ports. It's always handy to have some extra USB ports and also it's nice to have things like a headphone port or even something like an ethernet port or a video-in port.
Finally, extra drive bays are great for adding additional information displays to your computer. There are a number of LCD, LED and VFD displays out there. The VFD displays look pretty nice. They can display anything you want - stuff like CPU load, system temperatures and upload/download speeds. They can also display RSS feeds or, if you use the PC for media it can display song titles, video file names or television channel information.
Here are some examples:
http://www.matrixorbital.ca/products/pcbayinserts/ [matrixorbital.ca] http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/caseaccessories/imon-ultrabay [quietpc.com] http://www.xpcgear.com/a2331media.html [xpcgear.com]
Store User Guides, Manuals, Invoices, Warranties (Score:5, Informative)
Re:install lots of usb ports (Score:2, Informative)
Warning - 12v outlet not for accessories... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More hard drives. (Score:3, Informative)
The five-drive cases suck rocks when it comes to cooling. There isn't enough space between drives to move the air. Thermaltake's 4-drive converter actually keeps the drives cool, improving their life span.
I have 4 of these [supermicro.com] in an Antec 1200, and with the stock fans replaced with Noctua NF-B9 fans, it's not only nearly silent it keeps the drives under about 38 C (100 F). Since Google's research showed no appreciable correlation between drive temperature and failures rates until ~45+ C, that's good enough for me.
Storage (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps not the most creative use, but it seems every single item I connect to my PC needs a different cable - mostly USB, but there are so many versions to choose from these days. Plus other stuff like headphones, a portable hard disc, spare batteries for cordless mouse etc. Generally I'd got a pile of bits and pieces centred around a desktop with 7 empty 5.25" bays.
I've got a few of these: http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/caseaccessories/kama-cabinet-abk [quietpc.com] - they're just little storage drawers, but they're helpful for organising all the bits that go with the PC.
Re:More hard drives. (Score:3, Informative)
You mean on this report: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf [googleusercontent.com]
Figure 5 on page 6 shows drives running at temperatures over 35 degrees exhibiting distinctly higher failure rates after year 2. So if you plan to retire your drives after 24 months, then you're probably OK at 38 degrees.
I wish they'd separated 15-30 degrees into 15-20, 20-25 and 25-30 groupings. The data confirms that running drives too cold is almost as bad as running them too hot but it doesn't offer any hints as to exactly where the problem spikes.
I've used your supermicro 5-drive cages before. They're the best of the bunch. The front air intakes are quite respectable compared to most 5-drive cages. But even they are crammed too close and there aren't enough holes in the backplane to let the fan drag enough air through the cage.