Creative Uses For Extra Drive Bays?

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."

First toast

[Ethanol-fueled]

'Nuff said. [crazypc.com]

Re:First toast

[n1hilist]

Pfft, nVidia have been doing that for ages! And now with 3 way SLI I can do 3 slices at once!

Re:First toast

[adonoman]

Personally, I prefer the cup holder / cigarette lighter [crazypc.com].

Warning - 12v outlet not for accessories...

[aapold]

I have one of these. I charge my celphone with it using my car charger if I forgot the usb cable. However, once I needed to clean a (diferent) pc case and got the bright idea of using one of those 12v mini car vacuum cleaners. It lasted about 1.5 seconds before the PC just up and died. Fortunately no permanent damage was done. There probably was a warning about that somewhere in the discarded small print... I think the cup holder was supposed to be an ashtray actually. I use it to hold extra screw

Re:First toast

[ScrewMaster]

Personally, I prefer the cup holder / cigarette lighter [crazypc.com].

Install an electrically-fired ZIP gun in the thing ... anyone tries to break into your files, you set it off and have a "drive bay shooting".

Re:

[Runaway1956]

Not everyone has a terrarium. I captured these images from an article somewhere, sometime. Credits aren't mine, at all. ;^)

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/file001.jpg [photobucket.com]
http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/file002.jpg [photobucket.com]
http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/file000.jpg [photobucket.com]
http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/Technica.jpg [photobucket.com]

Obviously, you'll want to ensure that the terrarium is tightly closed between feedings!

Re:First toast

[Hognoxious]

Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes in this motherfucking PC!

Re:First toast

[Forge]

http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/plusdeck.html [frequencycast.co.uk] Sorry I couldn't do the link properly. busted keyboard :(

Re:First toast

[Splab]

They do, they even come with a monitor you can open and close over the keyboard - they call it a "laptop".

Re:First toast

[mcmonkey]

My first thought was an Easy Bake oven

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/ezbake.shtml [thinkgeek.com]

Cigarette Lighter and Cup Holder Bay Insert

[Esteanil]

I much prefer the Cigarette Lighter and Cup Holder Bay Insert [crazypc.com], guaranteed to break up fellow geeks, and it holds cups, too!

CD/DVD storage

[Yvan256]

http://www.xpcgear.com/cdhomesblue.html [xpcgear.com]

The SPARCplug

[bhima]

You can read a little about it here: http://wiki.auroralinux.net/wiki/SPARCplug [auroralinux.net]

Re:

[nitehawk214]

Is that a computer... in your computer?

Re:The SPARCplug

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg, I heard you like computers, so I put a computer in your computer so you can compute while you compute.

Re:

[ApolloX]

Yep, and they should sell a USB stick that goes inside that, that functions as another computer!

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So you can compute while you compute....

We did hear that you like that.

Re:The SPARCplug

[Cylix]

Better add another monitor so you can compute while you compute and not worry about a second monitor or x session.

http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1257&ID=1481 [thermaltakeusa.com]

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I'm pretty sure I measured it out once, and figured you could fit a GameCube inside a PC Case. Although possibly not in the drive basy. Probably somewhere underneath the drive bays where there is a lot of empty space. I think this is a great idea. Have a computer in your computer, So you can flip a switch, access your read only internet browsing computer, and do your banking, without having to worry about whether keyloggers and other MalWare are recording your every move.

Re:

[hitmark]

didnt gigabyte demo a motherboard with built in atom cpu and kvm?

Re:

[bhima]

yes... I wonder what happened with it.

Re:The SPARCplug

[stonewallred]

PC cases make great micro grow cabinets if you are into growing your own pot. Seen one where they put some really small mother board in the back section, and made the main case into a grow box. Complete with a carbon scrubber to kill the odor. Fully functional computer with a small plant growing inside. Dude got almost an ounce off it when dried and cured.

Re:

[NotBornYesterday]

Interesting ... sort of the inverse of the SunPCI card [wikipedia.org].

Rent it out to homeless ppl

[Spy Handler]

for cheap.

BAY AREA SMALL SPACE RENTAL

[blai]

For only $600 a month. Barely used, like new!*
Guaranteed bay view.

*Driver not included

cable management

[Vandil X]

I simply tuck the excess ribbon and power cables in the empty drive bays. Even easier if you get some cable management clips, the kind with adhesive to stick to the wall of the bays. This way you maximize airflow and such.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I've really wanted to get a modular power supply [tigerdirect.ca] so you don't have to worry about all those extra wires. Pair that up with SATA CDROM and hard drives, and you'd elimiate all the big wires from your case.

Re:

[omglolbah]

Sadly most of them have a pile of "default" cables that cant be removed. This usually includes the motherboard and 6-pin GPU cables.

These cables need to be long to reach "any" configuration so they tend to need space to be tied down :(

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Looking at the picture of the one I linked to, it seems like all of them can be removed. I don't see why they would only make some of them removable. Although I don't think there would be that many people who would would remove the motherboard cable.

More hard drives.

[RobVB]

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:More hard drives.

[Nkwe]

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.

Five drives actually. [newegg.com]

Re:

[Spazmania]

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.

Re:

[drsmithy]

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 f

Re:

[Spazmania]

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

Re:

[hitmark]

makes those maxi-towers that are all 5.25" fronts quite interesting as a NAS.

Re:

[Pentium100]

Yea. I have one of those. It has 11 5.25" bays, so I am using 6 of them to mount 8 hard drives, I also have mounted a DDS4 tape drive and a DVDRW drive (I also had a LTO drive in there, but moved it to an external enclosure to better cool it) and have 3 bays left for another 4 hard drives. Though I would need a IDE or SATA controller (or buy SCSI drives) since all I have left now is one connector on an IDE cable.

Re:

[click2005]

I prefer 8 2.5" drives in two 5.25" bays.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/PCICase-8-Bay-SATA-SAS-(SFF)-Backplane-needs-2-x-525-Slots [scan.co.uk]

Re:

[Pentium100]

2.5" drives are more expensive per gigabyte than 3.5" ones.

Also, they are smaller in capacity, probably 5 3.5" drives would have the same capacity as 8 2.5" drives.

Re:

[Spazmania]

More drives = faster raid. And that's before considering that 2.5" drives have an inherently faster seek time than 3.5" drives simply because of the smaller circumference of the platter.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

More drives = faster raid. And that's before considering that 2.5" drives have an inherently faster seek time than 3.5" drives simply because of the smaller circumference of the platter.

But slower transfer because the on-platter density is typically lower. Know your workload, and all that.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

oops, that wasn't Preview. .... and if you really care about seeks put SSD's in front of the hard drives, with ZFS or bcache type technology. You can cut your power consumption by 80% too. As they say, "ZFS loves cheap drives".

Re:

[Pentium100]

In that case you can use SSDs - even faster seek. Also, 15000RPM drives are even faster (though they are only 2.5" with larger drives being the same small disks but in a bigger case). I usually need capacity and do not really care about speed - as long as the drive can sustain 40MB/s linear read to feed the LTO2 tape drive.

As the system drive on my main PC I use a 36GB 15kRPM drive. All other computers have 10kRPM but quite old (9 - 18GB) drives as system. Data storage drives usually are 7200RPM and connect

Re:

[arth1]

Also, they are smaller in capacity, probably 5 3.5" drives would have the same capacity as 8 2.5" drives.

When running RAID, that's a plus for the smaller drives. Losing 1/8 of the space to parity is better than losing 1/5. Plus, it gives you greater versatility. 8 drives lets you run RAID 5+0, for example.

Another plus for the smaller drives is that it's easier to spin them faster. The momentum per platter is lower, and the risk of the head aeroplaning is smaller due to lower angular velocity. Which is

Re:

[Pentium100]

Losing 1/8 of the space to parity is better than losing 1/5. Plus, it gives you greater versatility. 8 drives lets you run RAID 5+0, for example.

However, the probability of two drives failing at once (or another drive failing during rebuild) is higher for an 8 drive array instead of a 5 drive array.

Still, if you need that much speed, just use SSDs - they have faster seeks than any spinning disk.

But that's about it.

Also price.

That's why I'm planning to buy a server that has 8 3.5" hard drive slots. I would be able to use 2 fast drives in RAID1 as system drive and 4 1.5-2TB 7200RPM drives for data and also have 2 empty slots for additional drives when I run out of space.

Re:

[PhrstBrn]

You can get better IOPs and throughput with 8-2.5" drives vs 5-3.5" drives in a disk array.

Re:

[rcw-home]

Your preference really depends on whether you're buying GB or I/Os per second.

How about 4x 2.5" hot swap SSD's up front?

[AllynM]

I've been using one of these for over a year. Handy for having your OS on a 4x SSD RAID. Uses only one 5.25" bay:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816710003 [newegg.com]

Be sure to get the beefier model (with the fans) if you want to use 4x VRaptors.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Re:

[actionbastard]

Three 5.25" bays hold twelve 2.5" drives [addonics.com] with a combined capacity of twelve TB [newegg.com].

Re:

[WuphonsReach]

Three 5.25" bays hold twelve 2.5" drives with a combined capacity of twelve TB.

Ick, ick, ick. So you're proposing to fit a case with a bunch of noisy, underperforming, low air volume 40mm fans? And not just 2, but 6? And you expect those fans to last for more then a few months before they start making even more noise?

At least the earlier linked 2.5" backplane [scan.co.uk] uses a pair of 60mm fans. Which are going to be quieter and more likely to last. I'd bet they move enough air to keep those 8 drives cool as

Fleshlight

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonus geek cred: Heated.

Re:Fleshlight

[Bieeanda]

We had these back in '99. http://www.welookdoyou.com/fufme/index.shtml.html [welookdoyou.com]

Card readers / more front ports

[Joe The Dragon]

Card readers / more front ports

Software RAID

[jonsmirl]

Build a software RAID array. Your disk performance will be significantly faster since reads can be parallelized out to multiple disks.

Fleshlight mount

[sharkey]

Warmth and vibration for your Fleshlight. [fleshlight.com]

Re:

[Joce640k]

Has nobody mentioned the fufme [google.com] yet? (NSFW)

install lots of usb ports

[FudRucker]

then start collecting usb thumbdrives and make a RAID array with them.

Re:

[Heratiki]

You mean like this? http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/thumbraid_1 [bigbruin.com]

Front-panel goodness

[Shrubbman]

I recently just dropped one of these [dealextreme.com] in my system the other day. Doing a search for "front panel" on DX can yield quite a number things to fill up those front bay slots with.

Re:

[WiglyWorm]

I dislike multi readers like that because every card slot shows up as a drive letter in windows. So I tend to use a USB external card reader.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One idea

[JanneM]

Use the space as a shelf and place your external networked backup drive inside. Just because it's logically separate doesn't mean it has to clutter up some corner of the room all by itself. Or your wifi station, though you'll need to let the antenna stick out of course.

toliet paper storage...

[xeroedouttwice]

...for those times when you need to clean your keyboard.

Lockbox

[meerling]

A key secured storage space for things like usb thumb drives and my password mini-list. Stuff that's important enough to not leave lying around, but not so important it would really hurt if someone else got it. (like root passwords, full password logbook, credit/debit cards, etc.)

Re:

[WiglyWorm]

Is there a repaired solution? I'd love to see one if you have a link. Especially if it were wide enough to fit important DVDs.

Re:

[GrumblyStuff]

Indeed. Granted, if they have the time and capacity to yoink your desktop, a lockbox would be just as easy to take. ...unless you have it bolted to the floor or wall studs (but even then...). Best design I've seen was one sunk into the concrete floor. Easy to miss and good fucking luck making off with that.

Though now that I think about it, having a half a dozen around the house as decoys would be great to confound and frustrate any thieves.

Another idea

[JanneM]

How about a small fridge unit, enough to cool a few cans of beer? I'm sure ThinkGeek could come up with something that'd fit right into two bays, with a separate spring-loaded bay for each can.

Re:

[gblackwo]

And you want to put the heat created from cooling those beers where? Into the already hot computer?

Re:

[CastrTroy]

You could probably vent it out of the top of the computer.

Re:Another idea

[Hognoxious]

And you want to put the heat created from cooling those beers where?

Into the hotplate for keeping your coffee warm. Do I have to do all the thinking round here?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Pentium100]

You like 50C beer?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Power supply

[Sarten-X]

An acquaintance of mine converted his extra bays in a full-size tower to a storage space for often-needed electronics. There were drawers for transistors, LEDs, regular diodes, some ICs, and the other little bits he used often in his robot-building hobby. The top bay had a current limiter in it, cleaning and isolating the power supplied to plugs on the front, fed from the PC supply.

Re:

[NFN_NLN]

An acquaintance of mine converted his extra bays in a full-size tower to a storage space for often-needed electronics. There were drawers for transistors, LEDs, regular diodes, some ICs, and the other little bits he used often in his robot-building hobby. The top bay had a current limiter in it, cleaning and isolating the power supplied to plugs on the front, fed from the PC supply.

I found one. Cool idea: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811997201 [newegg.com]

multi-drive hot-swap kit

[Rudeboy777]

I realize not everyone runs RAID 5 on their PC, but I do and for maximum convenience and cooling, convert 2 of those bays into 3-drive hot-swappable goodness.

http://www.istarusa.com/rackmount_chassis/product/BPU-230SATA/2x5.25_inch_to_3x3.5_inch_SATA2.0_Hot-Swap_Backplane_Raid_Cage.aspx [istarusa.com]

There is a large fan behind the drives which keeps drive temperatures very low (especially since I've only got single-platter 500GB Seagates in there).

This is a MUCH better option than multiple single-slot 5.25" trays with their tiny fans and lousy cooling.

I'm pretty sure this manufacturer does even larger units occupying 3 bays (RAID 10 anyone?)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

monitor

[Emmeau]

build a monitor in the drivebays http://tweakers.net/ext/f/yH7HML9VL2L3Rk5OK5grdosF/full.jpg [tweakers.net] full story (dutch) http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/1359397/0//scherm%2Cdrivebay [tweakers.net] All credit goes to Terw_Dan here, not my mod. Very impressive, and most useful solution of the drivebay space i've seen so far.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Front Panel Sound Bay and 120mm Fan

[sanosuke001]

- I have a sound card with a front panel bay with RCA inputs, mic/headphone jacks and volume controls as well as some sound preset buttons which takes up one bay.

- Three other bays (my case has 7 total) has a 120mm fan enclosure for air intake (cold air in front of the case means i don't recycle warm air from the back)

- Two bays have a BD-RE/HD-DVD combo drive and a DVD-RW

- The last bay has a fan speed control bay with four nobs to tune fans in my case.


Some other interesting things I've seen ar

Store User Guides, Manuals, Invoices, Warranties

[Cycloid Torus]

When I finish a build, I fill a ziplok poly bag full of all the stuff which I got with the parts I used for the box. Then I stuff it in a 5.25" bay which doesn't block ventilation. Sure beats looking though the stack of paper under my desk or in boxes or spare part bins.

5.25" floppy?

[toonie]

Stick a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive in there, just for the pose value.

May case only has 5.25" bays, 9 of them

[OrangeTide]

Nine external 5.25" bays and some fan modules(120mm) that fit in three bays with mounts for three 3.5" drives. at first you might thing it is a waste of space to put one 3.5" drive per 5.25" bay, but the extra space allows for airflow around the drive keeping them nice and cool. Thermaltake M9 and there are a few others with an identical 9-drive configuration.

EZ Bake Oven

[Lifyre]

EZ Bake oven is the ultimate in easy quick snack goodness!

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/ezbake.shtml [thinkgeek.com]

Grab a cold one

[bjs555]

http://yourdaily.blogspot.com/2007/03/pc-beer-dispenser.html [blogspot.com]

Fans fans fans

[WiglyWorm]

I have a nice HD bay fan [newegg.com] It works out great, because my HD bays are directly in line with my CPU heatsink, I got a couple more MHz out of my overclock upon installing this,

Lots of spare drive bays?

[Peet42]

Lots of old drives that are too small to be useful?

Try screwing a drive into every second bay. Make sure you use at least four screws per drive, preferably six...

The extra mass and rigidity of the drives will damp vibrations and make your computer sound *much* quieter. You don't need to actually wire the drives to anything.

You're welcome.

a drawer for CDs and doc

[kubitus]

keep the original media and doc ready

Automatic retractable cup holder

[sprior]

Oh wait, nevermind - got one already.

Silent HDD coolers

[Richard_J_N]

I only ever use the 5.25" bays, and find the 3.5" ones useless.

For example:
  http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/harddrivesolutions/smartdrive-neo [quietpc.com]
takes a conventional 3.5" disk, and both cools and quietens it.

The effect is quite dramatic: I cannot hear my PC at all.
(I already put a silent CPU heatsink in, and a very-quiet PSU).

Storage

[asc99c]

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.

3.5", not 5.25"

[arashi no garou]

I wanted a simple way to connect an original Xbox controller to my rig to play emulated games, and I knew that the Xbox game port is electrically and logically a USB port. So, I pulled one of the two port harnesses out of a dead Xbox, wired the ports to pin header connectors, and plugged them into the USB headers on my motherboard. The system recognized the controllers I plugged in as USB gamepads, with the help of the Xbox drivers for OS X and Windows (Linux has native support).

I found that the width of the gameport harness was a perfect fit for one of my two 3.5" bays, so I used a couple of self tapping screws to bolt them in place. Now, to use a gamepad I just open the drive door and plug it in. The most fun part for me was learning (via the OS X gamepad control panel) that the ABXY buttons can be switched to analog pressure control, just like the shoulder buttons. (Don't laugh, I'm not a regular Xbox player so I wasn't previously aware of this feature.)

Drive Bay UPS

[ledow]

Drive Bay UPS's aren't hard to come by. They only last for a few minutes normally but if it's something useful, practical and worthwhile.

Re:

[DarkKnightRadick]

Ok, how many 5.25" drives do you really need in a non CD/DVD replication computer? I have an HP Supermulti-drive (multiple DVD formats, all CD formats) w/Lightrscribe. What other need do I have for a second (third or even fourth) drive? Would you put an external drive out of it's case and put it in your PC? What's the point of buying the external then? I mean seriously.

Re:

[hedwards]

If I weren't using those drive bays for my radiator, I'd probably use them for hotswap SATA drives. Makes it a bit easier to dual boot and do backups.

Re:Umm, more drives?

[networkBoy]

I use one of these: 4x 2.5 sata [startech.com].
With 500 gig Scorpio blue drives hitting $55 it's actually price competitive with high quality DVD media, and certainly is space competitive.
(when figuring out price competitive I accounted for the fact that nearly 700 meg of a dvd is often wasted in file backups).

I wrote a perl script that computes and saves to the host and drive a hash table of all files on the archive so I can check for bit-rot.
-nB

Re:

[KlaymenDK]

It's a very interesting solution, and good to know that its price and space competitive -- but what about noise? Yes, I realise that you may just not care, and that's fine, but I do, and that's why I'm asking. Don't four drives make an awful racket, what with both spindle noise and their cross harmonics? Are they suspended/dampened/cooled in a sensible way?

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I used to make quite good use of 2 drives when I got my first CD Burner. One drive for reading, one for writing, that way you didn't fill up your tiny 4GB Hard drive with CD images. It was also useful if you wanted background music for games that also required the CD to be present. It worked really well when CD drives used to be just passive audio fed directly into the sound card, because you could have whatever music you wanted playing in your games, without using extra processor cycles.

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

Havn't you peasants heard of RAIT?

Or is your life expectancy so short dont you do backup any more?

Re:

[sheetsda]

I already have a 2 TB RAID0 in the internal bays of my case, and have only used a third of it over the past year and a half. A substantial chunk of that amount was copied from my previous machine (0.5 TB RAID0 there, and again extra 5.25 bays). Others have suggested more ports, but my motherboard [asus.com] supports 12 USB ports out of the box and I find I don't have need of that many much less any more. The toaster suggested by a poster above is more along the unusual/creative lines I was thinking. I don't think

Built-in Vaporizer?

[billstewart]

Hey, your PC's generating too much heat anyway, might as well use it?