Are there any new mid tower or full tower Cases with hot swappable drive bays?

[iDegenerated]

When the Corsair 800D was released the case attracted me the most for it's hot swap SATA drive bay in the front.

However, I never purchased one. The new 900D however lacks that feature..

Are there any cases with hot swap bays, that aren't rack mounted?

Thanks for any help that I can get!

 

[bambiboom]

When the Corsair 800D was released the case attracted me the most for it's hot swap SATA drive bay in the front.

However, I never purchased one. The new 900D however lacks that feature..

Are there any cases with hot swap bays, that aren't rack mounted?

Thanks for any help that I can get!

iDegenerated,

There are several solutions according to the number of drives needed.

The first is simply to add one or two 5.25" hot swap drive bay(s) to the front panel of a case. If you have a full tower it then may be possible to have two. These bays can be 2X 2.5" like the Startech ($41) or their 1X 3.5" drive version ($19).

If you need more drives, there are external drive enclosures such as the Icy Dock with 6X hot swap bays ($92). There are also various 3 and 4 drive external hot swap enccosures. For those though you would need an eSATA SAS RAID controller to handle the I/O although it might be possible to run a bundle of SATA cables out in some way..

For cases with integrated hot swap bays, Supermicro makes a full line of their "Superworkstations" in which several models have hot swap bays as well as Thunderbolt support which has been claimed to be up to 32GB/s. The Superworkstations include the case, motherboard, power supply, CPU cooler all ready to go- you just plug in the CPU, RAM, GPU, and drives. There are both workstation and gaming versions- LGA2011, LGA-2011-3 LGA1150, LGA1151 and I think LGA1366 still. These can be purchased as chassis too which still include the power supply. These are rated to be very quiet and the time saving is substantial- all those decisions have been made, and it not necessary to research, order, assemble, wire,configure, and test a system of all separate parts. Not in the inexpensive category but this is server-grade, high performance motherboard, and ultra-reliable 900 to 1300W power supplies. My next system may well be a dual Xeon Superworkstation- with hot swap bays as I could use depreciated Xeon E5-2600 v2 series CPUs.

What is the use of the proposed system?

Cheers,

BambiBoom

 

[dalewb]

I've been interested in hot-swap drive bays ever since I got my hands on the Obsidian D. Thanks for your insightful summary of options. It's really helpful and sucks the original poster didn't respond. Though I sometimes also forget I write posts, since email alerts from this forum often end up in my junk mail folder 😵 Good day to you!

 

[bambiboom]

I've been interested in hot-swap drive bays ever since I got my hands on the Obsidian D. Thanks for your insightful summary of options. It's really helpful and sucks the original poster didn't respond. Though I sometimes also forget I write posts, since email alerts from this forum often end up in my junk mail folder 😵 Good day to you!

dalewb,

I usually keep an extremely simple disk configuration, that stays put a while: usually an SSD with OS / Programs and my more or less active projects and reference files in a partition, then I have a 1TB drive with all the files I've ever made on the computer- about 70GB plus media files and reference stuff- 600GB. and a USB external 3.5" 500GB in an enclosure that only runs for backup. As for hot swap drives I instead use USB flash drives as they're easier to move from system to system. But as a workstationista, hot swap drives are alluring and if I had TB's instead of GB's to shift I'd have stacks of em.

Thank you for your generous words and also comments re: posters who never respond and in my case, it's about 1 in 5. There is a benefit to posting in that I learn to solve problems and improve my technical writing. But, yes, it's disappointing when a considered answer flies off into the ether.One I remember specifically was a $13,000 scientific workstation over which I'd gone to some amount of trouble. However, I keep a file of these configurations - now 120 pages, and there are so many I can usually find one that is quite close and only need three or four small changes.

Still, I understand that people are distracted and may even forget where they posted. I was concentrating all day yesterday on my current project, an HP z620 to which I added an eight-core Xeon and thought was running much too hot.

I've noticed though that the view count on this forum has dropped substantially. Three years ago when I joined, the viewing number was often over one hundred and one post concerning GTX vs. Quadro had something over 18,000 views over time. Now, there are sometimes under ten views.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

My motto: "Why use one word when twenty will do just as well."

 

[croppy106]

The rosewill blackhawk has a hard drive bay up on top