How can I cram more harddrives into a case?

Question

I have a Cooler Master Elite case, with 6 hard drives in the normal drive bays, and 2 more velcro'd to the floor of the case. I'd like to add 1 more drive to the system now, and the floor is just plain full. I also need to have room to potentially add more drives in the future. The drives also need to have some semblance of cooling. I have a 120mm blowing in the front, and I run the box with the side panel off the case.

I found this, which looks like it would solve the problem, and allow me to get the 2 drives up off the case floor. Has anyone ever used a product like this? Are they any good?

Any other suggestions on how to cram even more hard drives into this machine?

Answer 1

Yes, that product you linked would work well. I was going to simply suggest getting cheap mounting brackets to put more HDDs in your 5.25" bays, but with that many drives in your case the extra cooling from the product you linked would come in handy.

Another, probably better solution would be to use completely external HDDs. Cooling would not be as much an issue then. All you need to do is get enclosures which support eSATA. You don't even need to have eSATA on your motherboard either; you simply need one of these to convert your internal SATA ports to external eSATA ports.

Answer 2

Perhaps you should look into getting larger hard drives and consolidating some of the smaller ones?

Answer 3

I don't really know your situation, but I'd recommend getting some external HDD enclosures and going with some eSATA drives. Makes it pretty easy to expand and the speed is the same as an internal SATA drive.