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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."
You can read a little about it here: http://wiki.auroralinux.net/wiki/SPARCplug
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
I recently just dropped one of these 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.
I've been through the days where I wanted to do zillions of case mod's to my desktop PC; everything from a 5.25" toggled-switch fan controller bus to microcontroller-controlled lighting system that steals/slaves the 5v power from the PSU (which was pretty bitchin', btw).
All I'm saying is if you're super duper struggling to find a DIY solution to extra 5.25" bays in your PC and went as fas as to ask slashdot'ers what they think, I'd either: 1) just buy a new, slimline case that doesn't have extra bays, 2) take your girlfriend/wife/best friend out to lunch or 3) keep the money in the bank; anything else is just going to be a geek-fad money pit that'll die out sooner than it takes you find another idea to use that empty space for.
Personally, I prefer the cup holder / cigarette lighter.
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.)
http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/plusdeck.html Sorry I couldn't do the link properly. busted keyboard :(
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
My first thought was an Easy Bake oven
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/ezbake.shtml
build a monitor in the drivebays http://tweakers.net/ext/f/yH7HML9VL2L3Rk5OK5grdosF/full.jpg full story (dutch) http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/1359397/0//scherm%2Cdrivebay 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.
I have a nice HD bay fan 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 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.
http://www.xpcgear.com/cdhomesblue.html
I use one of these: 4x 2.5 sata.
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
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump