Cases with Cable-less Drive Bays?

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gregorerlich

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  • #1
    One feature I love(d) about the old cheesgrater Mac Pros was the drive bays. A few screws to mount the drive to a caddy, thunk it in the case, and bam, it's good to go. No screwing around with cables. By contrast, my PC has caddies for the drives, but you still need to run a cable to each drive individually. Swapping a drive means mounting it in the caddy, pulling cables out, connecting the drive, and carefully stuffing the cables back in as you mount the caddy in the case. It's stupid.

    I have struggled to find a PC case with a similar feature other than very expensive NAS cases. Is there just no demand, and so nobody makes this? Or am I just not finding them?
     
    continuum

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  • #2
    gregorerlich said:
    there just no demand,
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    This++;

    Backplanes require more design and engineering and hence cost too, and with so little demand to start with (even before SSDs became a thing in consumer space).... yeah, they were a very rare product even 20 years ago. The Lian-Li PC-O11 series is one of the few with them today.


    And in more recent changes (past 5 years or so), with consumer market M.2 drives up to 8TB now, even less demand for drive bays. So yeah...
     
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    continuum

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  • #4
    continuum said:
    The Lian-Li PC-O11 series is one of the few with them today.
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    Correcting myself: not all of them. The PC-O11D XL does (see review), the PC-O11D Evo does not (see review).

    The Lian-Li LanCool II does have a hot swap upgrade to its 3.5" cage available (see review), but the newer LanCool 3 does not (see review).

    So yeah... the few cases that did have it, largely seems to be removed in their successor designs. And you have to be careful of thermals, the cooling in the PC-O11D XL drive cages is pretty much non-existent and the cages are basically getting no airflow.
     
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    redtomato

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  • #5
    Why rely on the case manufacturer to build a hot-swap cable-less bay? Just buy the case you like, buy the HDD / SSD docking station / caddy enclosure you like, and mount it in the case.

    I suspect case manufacturers are not keen on building in docking stations because (a) the fast ones are expensive and the cheap ones are slow (b) there’s a risk of customers using them for the system drive which isn’t a good idea (c) risk of customers damaging drives by pulling them while in use or other means, then blaming the case manufacturer. Hassle for them.
     
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    gregorerlich

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  • #6
    redtomato said:
    Why rely on the case manufacturer to build a hot-swap cable-less bay? Just buy the case you like, buy the HDD / SSD docking station / caddy enclosure you like, and mount it in the case.

    I suspect case manufacturers are not keen on building in docking stations because (a) the fast ones are expensive and the cheap ones are slow (b) there’s a risk of customers using them for the system drive which isn’t a good idea (c) risk of customers damaging drives by pulling them while in use or other means, then blaming the case manufacturer. Hassle for them.
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    Why would a docking station have any speed or other implications (eg don't use it for boot drive)? It should just be a direct 1:1 connection to the motherboard's SATA ports, ie one cable from the motherboard for each drive slot, and the station functions just as a female to male adapter.
     
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  • #7
    gregorerlich said:
    Why would a docking station have any speed or other implications (eg don't use it for boot drive)? It should just be a direct 1:1 connection to the motherboard's SATA ports, ie one cable from the motherboard for each drive slot, and the station functions just as a female to male adapter.
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    What you’re saying is sensible, but sensible can be difficult in the world of enclosures and docking stations. Cheap ones route everything over USB3 eg 2-3 drives sharing a single usb3 connection.
     
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    teubbist

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  • #10
    Because, again, it's a niche. One that has shrunk further as 5.25" bays have disappeared from cases.

    And depending on how "correct" you want to be about it, the backplanes do include a bunch of extra components on the PCB to do stuff like smooth initial power on, delay/retimer/etc. data lines along with any thermal management that some docks do. That all ratchets up the cost.

    If you want something cheaper and more barebones, aliexpress would be a better source.
     
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  • #12
    I might be misreading this but I have a desktop with no drive bays at all - an 'open' case Thermaltake P3.

    For drives (I am assuming we are talking hard drives here), I have an overkill Terramaster D4-300 usb-c 'dumb' drive box that can hold 4 hard drives. Swap in and out no drama. Works great. And I keep drives 'out' generally to make them isolated from electrics and better backups.
     
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    gregorerlich

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  • #14
    steelghost said:
    The question I have is why do you need to swap 3.5" drives so often, and might there be easier ways to accomplish that goal than spending hundreds on a niche piece of hardware, or chancing your data on something from AliExpress that may or may not work well or reliably.
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    Not swapping them super often, just feels crazy to have all these cables and this shitty system, is all. It's so nice in the old cheesegrater Mac Pro. But yeah, not worth hundreds of dollars or cheap Chinese crap.

    Seems like the options are basically rackmount-style case, NAS case, a few niche standard tower cases maybe, and add-in hardware to a regular case. It is what it is I guess.

    Thanks for all the replies!
     
    Nevarre

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  • #15
    I mean, in the year 2024 most new computers have zero cables connecting drives. The typical use case is one single NVMe drive on the motherboard and that's it. That's the 'normal' use case. Most cases still have the ability to connect SATA but not every user will have any SATA SSDs and SATA HDD's are rarer still.

    If you the personal computer user want/need mass storage, you're more likely to be doing that in a separate device like a NAS box or whatever.
     
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