Question When did hard drive racks/cages disappear

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
wicked_sticky

wicked_sticky

Distinguished
Nov 1, 2015
239
9
18,815
I haven't bought a new case in a very long time. Budget towers allways had hard drive racks than held 9-12+ 3.5" or 5.25" drives in the front. When did that stop being a thing?
 
images

Ralston18 said:
Interesting....

9-12 racks?

I can remember maybe 3 or 4 HDD racks in pre SSD times.

But then again I was not buying/using tower cases.

What case manufacturers are you remembering?

Just curious
Click to expand...
The Antec 300 was a very basic budget nudtower case 6 x 3.5" 3x5.25". Cooler master hafs all had a similar lay out more bays. Thermaltake's budget mid towers all looked like the Antec but narrower. .. 9 bays was the standard minimum for mid towers. From 2004-2014... I stopped buying cases since then, no clue when that front rack went away.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NedSmelly
wicked_sticky said:
. I stopped buying cases since then, no clue when that front rack went away.
Click to expand...
It was about 2015 I noticed laptops started to remove their DVD drives and the trend on PC at least Dell's in 2018 or so moved to DVD's with slot load drives or a laptop DVD in a desktop.

About 2020 it seems the trend went fast to RGB PC cases and gone were the DVD bays along with the space from motherboards end to front of the case. Just enough room for the longest GPU's of 2020. Most of the of DYI crowd also wanted micro itx or atx motherboards so most cases got smaller.

It kind of made since as parts were smaller " motherboards " no DVD racks anymore and a windowed PC case was like looking at a body builder with top half buff " PC case " and chicken legs on the bottom looking at the almost empty parts inside.

I'm not really a fan of RGB lights but I have to admit those lights were a cheap solution from manufacturer to remove actual case size and racks along with the DVD drives and have the case big or small look filled up.

Than in 2023 both Nvidia and AMD now have massive size current GPU's that again need a bigger case.
 
  • Like
Reactions: wicked_sticky
Not as many drive cages. Cases usually have a couple now but as 2.5 ssds came in the hard drives started being phased out. In my pc for example I don’t even have a hard drive. 2 nvme drives and maybe a 2.5 ssd or 2. In a few years they may not even have drive bays since nvme drives are so common. In fact my z690 board has 4 nvme slots. And nvme vs 2.5 isn’t a lot of price difference.
 
ohio_buckeye said:
Not as many drive cages. Cases usually have a couple now but as 2.5 ssds came in the hard drives started being phased out. In my pc for example I don’t even have a hard drive. 2 nvme drives and maybe a 2.5 ssd or 2. In a few years they may not even have drive bays since nvme drives are so common. In fact my z690 board has 4 nvme slots. And nvme vs 2.5 isn’t a lot of price difference.
Click to expand...
I do keep a HDD because for storage it offers more for the money. One quiet benefit is that you rarely have problems with dead HDDs, at least the good ones.

There's tons of crap files that add up over the years . Photos and videos have become very large. There's a lot of documents on every PC that are not used often but need to be somewhere. These do not benefit from SSD speeds in a huge way. So i'd stick that stuff on a large, "old reliable".
OS, games and depending on work maybe some work related files benefit from being on a SSD.

A PC without a HDD? Seems silly. Likewise, more than 1-2 HDD trays seems silly unless they're combo trays that fit SSDs.
 
I've got back and looked at "best ATX cases of 2024" all the way through "... of 2012". I think I can answer my own question.
In general it looks like in 2012-2014 the trend was to leave a gap in the middle of the HDD rack for long GPU's , 2014-2015 the optical bays on top were taken out leaving just a short 3-5 hdd rack in the bottom of the case. By 2016 the rack in the bottom 1/3 was not a standard thing.

stonecarver said:
... kind of made since as parts were smaller " motherboards " no DVD racks anymore and a windowed PC case was like looking at a body builder with top half buff " PC case " and chicken legs on the bottom looking at the almost empty parts inside.

I'm not really a fan of RGB lights but I have to admit those lights were a cheap solution from manufacturer to remove actual case size and racks along with the DVD drives and have the case big or small look filled up.

Than in 2023 both Nvidia and AMD now have massive size current GPU's that again need a bigger case.
Click to expand...
Having an optical bay slot allowed me to add new i/o. My cases are all USB 2.0 but I was able to stick a card reader + USB 3 ports in the front of my case. By 2014 I owned 6 full ATX cases, (including a beige tower) I never needed to buy more, just new 5.25" USB adapters. I guess the new gen of PC builders doesn't have that luxury anymore
ohio_buckeye said:
Not as many drive cages. Cases usually have a couple now but as 2.5 ssds came in the hard drives started being phased out. In my pc for example I don’t even have a hard drive. 2 nvme drives and maybe a 2.5 ssd or 2. In a few years they may not even have drive bays since nvme drives are so common. In fact my z690 board has 4 nvme slots. And nvme vs 2.5 isn’t a lot of price difference.
Click to expand...
I could buy 24TB of 3.5" HDD's (two 12tb drives) for $190(generic) - $240 (reputable brand), 24tb SATA SSD would cost $950 M.2 would cost $1200 and $/tb sweet spot for SSD is 4tb so it'd require 6 drives.
More importantly SATA drives can just sit on the rack safe and unplugged til you need them. Takes 3 seconds to plug in. Without special equipment m.2 requires a lot more work to swap out. I have a bunch of 250-500gb SATA m.2's that are basically useless because of the hassle of swapping them out.
I think I'll buy a case once m.2 "racks" and cables become a thing.

NedSmelly said:
As far as what's currently available, Antec still make the VSK4000B and there's the Thermaltake Versa H25. Both are within the budget finger-slicer segment. Silverstone have also kept a lot of their server/NAS cases in production.
Click to expand...
^^ this makes sense. I built my wife a gaming PC in 2015. A Thermaltake versa h25 predecessor was by far the cheapest case that fit the GPU+heatsink, I didn't look at anything else, otherwise I would've noticed those long HDD racks were already disappearing 9 years ago.
 
wicked_sticky said:
I haven't bought a new case in a very long time. Budget towers allways had hard drive racks than held 9-12+ 3.5" or 5.25" drives in the front. When did that stop being a thing?
Click to expand...
When M.2 drives became popular. Mechanical drives have largely been phased out. They are too slow and take up to much space in a case.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom