Creative Uses for 5.25" Drive Bays?

ZeLonewolf asks: "Like I'm sure many slashdot readers, my computer has a number of free 5.25" drive bays free. After the requisite burner, DVD drive, maybe a tape drive, there's invariably a few slots free. Do any slashdot readers have any creative suggestions for filling the gap?"

Comments

sound card oscilloscope

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a plate for the probes of your sound card oscilloscope ?

Two ideas

[BlueLightning]

1. LCD Panel from CrystalFontz, Matrix Orbital, or make your own.
2. I/O panel such as a FrontX. These are great.

Disc Bay Disc Holder.

[Fritzed]

Well I like the idea of keeping some of your most commonly used CDs handy in those extra bays with one of these CD holders.

-> Fritz

JukeCD

[Card]

I saw this modification on a Finnish case mod site. The idea is to create a flashy way to carry up to 30 cd-r's in a dedicated storage bay. Unfortunately the text behind this link is in Finnish, but you can get the idea by looking at the pictures. You need just an old, non-working CDROM drive for this mod.

It might be a good idea to check the final picture at the bottom of the page first to see what the author's goal is.

Re:Removable hard disk caddies

[TheLink]

Yah I have a few of these. I had to pick the same model and brand so that the caddies are interchangeable. The idea is so I can run multiple O/Ses which are independent (tho not concurrent), and also make it easy to transfer lots of data from PC to PC.

While PCs are cheap, ATA HDDs are much cheaper so it's actually a useful approach for a computer lab - Win NT4.0 HDD, Win2K HDD, FreeBSD HDD, Linux HDD etc. And each user can have their own personal HDD+caddy.

I figure some serial ATA drives will support hotswap soon.

frontx!

[aderusha]

howabout any ports you want? frontx lets you "roll your own" front panel ports with a reconfigurable system for adding usb, 1394, key/mouse, audio, and just about whatever else into the front of your pc by way of a 5.25" drive bay face plate.

Non-creative but useful solutions:

[Masem]

• Extra intake fan port. Unless you have a case that has a panel that would cover the 5.25 portion, you can purchase fan kits that can help with air flow if you have a case problem.
• Cooled HD drive bay. Similar to the above, but right behind the fans is a mount for a standard 3.5" drive, if you're doing any sort of video editing or massive drive utilization, you can stick this in there and keep the drive itself nice and cool.
• Sound card "breakout" box. At least on my Windows drive, my SB Extigy Platinum has a nice 5.25" box that I can connect various sound equipment as well as more USB/firewire devices at the front of the computer instead of the back, also had the IR recievers for the remote. There's also third party breakout boxes that are not quite as sophisticated, but at least offer various audio utilites including standard stereo in's and out's, graphics equalizers, etc., typically installed by adding a back panel where a PCI would normally go, routing the normal sound card inputs to this, and then a ribbon cable to the box.
• Extra USB/Firewire connect points. You can never go wrong with adding more of these; I believe I've seen commercial solutions that fit nicely into the 5.25" bay, but if you're willing to get a bit dirty by cutting the plastic facing to add these ports, it's doable.
• System monitor. Little panels with a 20x4 (maybe 40x4?) LCD display that can be used to track temperatures, voltages, and possible access some /dev type readings so that even with the screensaver on/monitor off, you can quickly glance at the LCD and figure out the state of the machine.
• Another DVD-Rom/CD-Rom drive. The original poster sounds like he already has one DVD-R and a CD-RW, but if you're a gamer, a lot of newer games require the CD in the drive to play. Easy enough if you're only playing one game, but what if you want to bounce back and forth between two or more games? You can keep both game CDs in separate drives, and thus you don't have to worry about disk flipping while playing.
• Another CD-R(W) drive. Plan weekly backups to this drive (w/o erasing the original data), just making sure that you flip in a new unformatted CDR into the drive on a normal schedule, and this way, as long as you only use that drive for that purpose, you won't miss a backup because you swapped disks on your main burner.

USB Ports

[cdmz1]

I installed a USB hub that lives in the 5.25" bay. Makes it much easier than reaching around back....not to mention that my PCI USB 2.0 card has a header on the PCB allowing me to hook up an extension seamlessly....it is a fantastic use of a bay.

Re:Airflow!

[Tower]

With tower cases, things usually end up as a two-zone airflow solution...
1) Lower zone (motherboard, maybe a drive or two): Intake on front, exhaust over CPU through power supply.

2) Upper zone (front 5-bays and rear drive mounts):
Intake on one or more 5-bays (possibly a drive cooler for additional space), exhaust with 2 80mm fans on the back.

With a quiet PS and quiet fans, your hard drives and CPU fan could be the bulk of the noise. My large case currently has the setup above (3 intake, three exhaust fans) and after upgrading to the quieter fans, I had to get a new CPU cooler to lower that noise. The 15krpm drives are now the loudest component, but only on seeks - a little bit of vibration isolation on those does a wonder of good, too.