5.25" bays are not useless!

2020-11-02 at 15:00

For the longest time I thought this is an antiquated form factor. I mean what are you gonne stick in them? CD burners? Hah. But today I got sceptical.

I was looking for a new homeserver case when I stumbled across multiple cases with *a lot* of 5.25" slots. But why? Why more than one even? The answer is hot swap drive cages. Apparently you can stick up to 6 SSDs into a single 5.25" slot with an adapter!

It will look something like this

And this is not server board exclusive, you can even stick them into your home computers. With 2.5" drives often being >2TB in current times, you could install 12TB of SSD storage into a single slot. Provided you have 6 SATA or SCSI slots free on your mainboard.

My mind was blown and my day improved.