Are Things Still This Tough?
From The Hard Edge June 2001
Has anyone else noticed that the ATX form-factor cases just don’t have enough drive bays? There was Bill, assembling a system over the weekend, and all he wanted to do was put in two CD drives (a DVD and a CD-R, and yes, he could have used one combo drive, but he didn’t have a spare), two 7GB hard drives in a RAID configuration, a 60GB drive for music storage, and an LS-120 120MB-1.44MB Imation drive. Well, he really wanted to install more drives because he was transplanting them from an old Gateway 166MHz system into the new one but there wasn’t enough room.
(Don’t worry, the old system had undergone a bunch of upgrades in the interim. The only problem with re-using the roomier chassis was that the power supply had the wrong style connectors for the MSI BX Master motherboard and it was too late in the evening for Bill to run out to look for a new and compatible PS.)
When all was said and done, there Bill sat, a homeless Zip drive in one hand and SCSI disk in the other, wondering, where had all the drive bays gone?
Could it be that, with the advent of gigabyte sized drives to replace the paltry megabyte devices of the past, someone might have suspected that we don’t need that many bays any more? Are they crazy? It’s bad enough that bays are spaced such that stretching the IDE cable between two drives is just short of magic. But don’t they know that the purpose of computing is excess? It’s always more –whether you actually need more of whatever ‘it’ might happen to be or not (and few people do).
So where are the ten --and more-- bay cases of today? Somewhere, down in the sub-basement of the Basement of Doom and Pepsi Cola, Bill suspects that there might still be a leftover 13 bay chassis that has dual 450 watt power supplies with fan speeds controlled by thermistors. It began life as 80486 Northgate system with an 80MB SCSI hard disk and an MO drive. But even if he dug down through the layers of past technology to finally uncover that huge monstrosity, it too wouldn’t have the correct connectors.
Has anyone else noticed that the ATX form-factor cases just don’t have enough drive bays? There was Bill, assembling a system over the weekend, and all he wanted to do was put in two CD drives (a DVD and a CD-R, and yes, he could have used one combo drive, but he didn’t have a spare), two 7GB hard drives in a RAID configuration, a 60GB drive for music storage, and an LS-120 120MB-1.44MB Imation drive. Well, he really wanted to install more drives because he was transplanting them from an old Gateway 166MHz system into the new one but there wasn’t enough room.
(Don’t worry, the old system had undergone a bunch of upgrades in the interim. The only problem with re-using the roomier chassis was that the power supply had the wrong style connectors for the MSI BX Master motherboard and it was too late in the evening for Bill to run out to look for a new and compatible PS.)
When all was said and done, there Bill sat, a homeless Zip drive in one hand and SCSI disk in the other, wondering, where had all the drive bays gone?
Could it be that, with the advent of gigabyte sized drives to replace the paltry megabyte devices of the past, someone might have suspected that we don’t need that many bays any more? Are they crazy? It’s bad enough that bays are spaced such that stretching the IDE cable between two drives is just short of magic. But don’t they know that the purpose of computing is excess? It’s always more –whether you actually need more of whatever ‘it’ might happen to be or not (and few people do).
So where are the ten --and more-- bay cases of today? Somewhere, down in the sub-basement of the Basement of Doom and Pepsi Cola, Bill suspects that there might still be a leftover 13 bay chassis that has dual 450 watt power supplies with fan speeds controlled by thermistors. It began life as 80486 Northgate system with an 80MB SCSI hard disk and an MO drive. But even if he dug down through the layers of past technology to finally uncover that huge monstrosity, it too wouldn’t have the correct connectors.
posted by Bill at 8:37 PM
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