The problem is they get mocked in reviews if they have drive bays, either for being outdated or for having all that "wasted space" occupied by a drive cage when you could put more fans there

I think it's more or less a one way street at this point, and I'd agree, the decline in these cases has become steeper. That said, there are a few notable exceptions; last week I picked up a brand new Evercase CS101 with space for a 3.5 and 5.25 external and plenty more inside. I don't think they're out of production just yet, but, the end is certainly nigh.

As for your last question. The hope on the horizon is this; interest in vintage computing continues to boom and with the number of people getting into 3D printing - the same kinds of people who post at places like Vogons, it is inevitable we will see a cottage industry for these kinds of cases, I've already seen at least one design for a Baby AT shared on here, I believe countless others will follow for all shapes, sizes and physical media needs.

Its the industries obsession in catering to gamers and their need for MOAR fans, MOAR rads space and unicorn puke RGB on everything, oh lets not forget tempered glass on all sides too..bleh, I dont see this ending anytime soon as it clearly sells cases.

I want the external 5.25 and 3.5 drive bays, I hate RGB unless I can control it without stupid bloat ware and even then prefer static colours that dont overpower everything.

Thankfully companies like Fractal and ThermalTake still make cases with external drive bays, you do pay a bit more for these cases as they tend to be large cases designed for EATX server space stuff such as the Define 7 XL.

You can still get new cases with drive bays, but they are indeed becoming rarer.

I recently bought this Chieftec Libra for one of my retro systems, and it even has a 3.5" floppy drive bay. Not exactly a recent case, but it's still being sold brand new in stores.

Most people don't buy a new case for every new build, just reuse the old one until it falls apart. Others use the case that comes with the prebuilt rig and don't care if it doesn't have a drive bay because they don't even know what a DVD is. People who want the best and spend the $$$ will always have options because the niche market is built around them. The rest can have the millions of used cases that pollute the planet everywhere. You can buy a perfect XT case for like $20 and those were made like 40 years ago so it won't be a problem in our lifetime. UNLESS you want a very specific case and only brand new or NOS.

I'd say the 'no drive bays!' Situation is a glorious rennaisance opportunity for external drive enclosures.

That said though, there *are* modern 'pizzabox' cases that have 5.25" drive bays.

Silverstone has a pretty wide range of offers with 1 or 2 5.25" bays.

See for instance, this pizzabox.

https://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-Micro-ATX- … s%2C106&sr=8-19

Or this mid tower

https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology … yY2hfbXRm&psc=1

I agree that most modern offerings want to jam endless fans and pretty LEDs in there instead, and if you are unfortunate enough to have only those options, I'd again point out that vintage gear had the same problems then, and solved them then.

Hunt down some good scsi controllers, and either buy, or fabricate, some scsi enclosures. SCSI floppy drives are indeed things.

Edit--

As concerns 'vintage cases';

It's easy to fall victim to the subjective bias that, just because people like US obscessively retain vintage gear, other people do too.

The reality is that much of that old kit has already found a home rotting in the sun in the south pacific decades ago.

Not that I am in any way in favor of ADDING MORE e-waste, just saying that, literally, 'that ship already sailed'. As in a literal ship, full of ewaste, that set sail decades ago, and you wont be getting those things back.

Yeah, it's getting much harder to find a good case with a 5.25" bay. I bought a Fractal Design Define R6 USB-C back in 2019 and I will probably use that as long as the form factor is suitable. It's quite a large case, but the cooling is sufficient to keep a 5800X3D (undervolted with PBO2 tuning, cooled by a Thermalright Frost Commander 140), Gigabyte X570 motherboard and an Asus TUF 3080 10GB cool and quiet under any load I put it through. The reason I got this case was so that I could use one of these IcyDock dual SATA drive bays. I do a lot of testing and other things with SATA drives, and I also do my backups on SATA hard drives or SSDs. Having two drives running simultaneously without the limits and quirks of going through a USB controller is awesome.

My previous case was a Cooler Master 690 II Advanced, which had a SATA tray in the top of the case and I used that functionality all the time.

Without a drive bay I'm not sure how I'll get this same functionality in the future. If NVMe density and price continues to drop it eventually won't be necessary to have a SATA dock for most things, but there seems to be a serious lack of external PCI-E "docks" for quickly swapping NVMe drives. USB enclosures can be okay, but if there was an affordable NVMe dock that just connected via a PCI-E card that would be ideal. I mean, come on, GPU miners use adapters that repurpose USB cables as PCI-E extensions. I know this isn't a standard, but why don't we have a standard for this other than the stupidly priced and complicated Thunderbolt? I can buy one of those mining adapter kits and run a USB cable outside my tower for almost nothing, but there isn't an elegant solution to attach NVMe drives to them outside of a PC without an exposed circuit board laying on the floor or something.

IcyDock does seem to make these, but it's hardly convenient to access the back of the PC for this purpose. They aren't exactly cheap either at $80 US. They also have ones for 3.5" and 5.25" bays, but those are way way more expensive and brings us right back to the lack of bays on newer cases. Also, I guess OCuLink is a standard that costs even more than Thunderbolt? Great.

(Sorry, just realized this veered way off topic, 🤣.)

Quick look on newegg for cases with 2 external 5.25 bays came back with 47 results.
(I figure 1 for optical and 1 for FDD with an adapter)

That's not much out of the entire newegg stock but still a good healthy choice.
but yes just like AT cases then beige cases, cases with external drive bays will disappear.
I don't think I've used external media apart from a USB stick for at least 5 years at work aka retro free zone.

I guess it's a good time to check your local PC repair-oriented shops for 2nd hand cases they'll sell cheap.
I only know of 1 such shop around me, and the one time I went in there I wasn't impressed. But some of those places do make an effort to sell used parts before throwing them away.

I don't understand modern mid-tower cases. You can't put anything in them, and most motherboards are microATX anyway. I don't see what the size is for. It's like they're just big for looks at this point.
People get silly about cooling. Very few people have any more watts to dissipate than gaming systems did ~15 years ago, and they did it while still allowing you to put things inside the case.

Weirdly, I've gotten to this point in my life without ever owning a window case. I might actually like to have one, but desirable ones (designed in a past decade) may disappear again without me ever claiming one.

I still feel the real solution here is something like a scsi external enclosure setup.

(Reference only. The actual item is so overpriced I would never suggest with a straight face. Really, this idea is vastly more approachable with a 3d printer than a full system chasis is, which is the REAL suggestion here.)

In very modern systems, esata is a thing, and esata enclosures would be just as straightforward to implement as this 50pin scsi box is: 12v+5v industrial psu + dumb cabling.

Drop some sata dvd(rw) drives in, and call it good. (Or put IDE devices in on a sata bridge, such as an ls120)

I am *QUITE CERTAIN* one can fabricate their own on a 3D printer, with an industrial psu from amazon, for *MUCH CHEAPER* than the 450$ that seller wants for the example above.

eSATA is not a thing in modern system at all. That standard newer grew out of SATAII speed.

It's "a simple expansion card away", is my dig.

Like say, this one.

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-Port-Express- … yY2hfYXRm&psc=1

Your typical DVD drive, or bridged IDE device, is NOT going to be all that fast to begin with.

If you want to strap lots of modern spinny disks inside (like for a NAS), you are better off looking for a suitable industrial chasis.

See for instance, this pizzabox.

Silverstone has much better solution for mATX - https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology … X/dp/B08CKZL1L4

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-22, 07:18:

See for instance, this pizzabox.

Silverstone has much better solution for mATX - https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology … X/dp/B08CKZL1L4

Yup. Like I said, plenty of choices from them.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-03-22, 06:34:

I still feel the real solution here is something like a scsi external enclosure setup. […]
Show full quote

I still feel the real solution here is something like a scsi external enclosure setup.

(Reference only. The actual item is so overpriced I would never suggest with a straight face. Really, this idea is vastly more approachable with a 3d printer than a full system chasis is, which is the REAL suggestion here.)

In very modern systems, esata is a thing, and esata enclosures would be just as straightforward to implement as this 50pin scsi box is: 12v+5v industrial psu + dumb cabling.

Drop some sata dvd(rw) drives in, and call it good. (Or put IDE devices in on a sata bridge, such as an ls120)

I am *QUITE CERTAIN* one can fabricate their own on a 3D printer, with an industrial psu from amazon, for *MUCH CHEAPER* than the 450$ that seller wants for the example above.

Very modern ..no Esata died, it was on a range of consumer boards about 10 years ago but the standard was dropped, I haven't seen esata on consumer motherboards in quite a while now, even budget offerings dont have it. I guess its possible some server based boards may still have it but even then its use is very limited due to USB_C / Thunderbolt being cheaper and faster.

Perhaps you are talking about eSATAp which is technically a merging of USB and eSata into one port, it accepts both USB and sata devices and can also provide 12v/5v power over the port, this port replaced the one above and weirdly shares similar naming even though its technically not related to the original eSata port.

If you want to do external enclosures on a consumer motherboard then USB-C, Thunderbolt 4 or even External SAS via an add in card is an option. USB-C would be easiest to use as pretty much every modern PC has it now, if you need super fast data transfer then one of the SAS based add in boards would be the way to go but again USB-C and Thunderbolt 4 both have crazy speeds and transfer rates. (If you can run two 4090s over TB4 externally without bottlenecking then im sure its fast enough)

True enough, but getting a suitably 'not braindamaged' usb-c > sata cots controller in an affordable pricepoint will be a challenge.

Such controllers are NOT simple devices, as they have to present appropriate HID class controls to the host. This means they have to be smart enough to know what you have plugged into it.

(Is that ls120 the genuine ata version, or the atapi version? Etc...)

Esata is old, but cheap cards exist, as pointed out.

They dont have to be all that smart; They just present the devices as-is to the host, and the host gets to figure it out. The big problem with them, was that they did not cleanly establish port replication/sharing, and had competing standards.

USB consortium had THAT solved LONG ago.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-03-22, 08:02:

True enough, but getting a suitably 'not braindamaged' usb-c > sata cots controller in an affordable pricepoint will be a challe […]
Show full quote

True enough, but getting a suitably 'not braindamaged' usb-c > sata cots controller in an affordable pricepoint will be a challenge.

Such controllers are NOT simple devices, as they have to present appropriate HID class controls to the host. This means they have to be smart enough to know what you have plugged into it.

(Is that ls120 the genuine ata version, or the atapi version? Etc...)

Esata is old, but cheap cards exist, as pointed out.

They dont have to be all that smart; They just present the devices as-is to the host, and the host gets to figure it out. The big problem with them, was that they did not cleanly establish port replication/sharing, and had competing standards.

USB consortium had THAT solved LONG ago.

yeah, USB-C/TB4 to Sata wont be cheap but if you get a good card its worth it just in transfer speeds and device bandwidth alone, could have a few dozen devices hooked up over USB-C if needed.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-22, 04:25:

Its the industries obsession in catering to gamers and their need for MOAR fans, MOAR rads space and unicorn puke RGB on everything, oh lets not forget tempered glass on all sides too..bleh, I dont see this ending anytime soon as it clearly sells cases.

I want the external 5.25 and 3.5 drive bays, I hate RGB unless I can control it without stupid bloat ware and even then prefer static colours that dont overpower everything.

That's also what I see happening. Then the case manufacturers smash the fans against the glass so there's no airflow. The fans do nothing but light up. Also, everyone copies each other, so there are only two basic case designs left (the full tower glass RGB abominations that every "content creation workstation" is built in or NZXT H500 clones).

I don't know if RGB lighting is what people actually want or if they only buy it because they feel like there's no other choice. If you don't like it, someone will tell you that you can just install the ridiculously bloated 700MB (or larger) lighting control software and turn them off. The software hooks itself so deeply into Windows that it causes random BSODs and maximum-severity security vulnerabilities, and each brand of control software conflicts with each other. That's fine, though. Everything is fine. Just keep consuming and everything will be okay. Things can't be that bad if you have RGB lighting. Just stare at the lights and forget about those remote access vulnerabilities.

More radiator space is essential today with the rapidly increasing power consumption of modern hardware. When your CPU draws 300W and your GPU draws 450W (with provision for up to 600W and rumors of 1000W power delivery coming), you need a lot of cooling. Even "mobile" CPUs can hit 150W, and my entire desktop (including both monitors) probably draws less than that. Modern hardware is depressing.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-22, 07:08:

eSATA is not a thing in modern system at all. That standard newer grew out of SATAII speed.

I've never seen anyone use eSATA.

lti wrote on 2024-03-22, 15:25:

That's also what I see happening. Then the case manufacturers smash the fans against the glass so there's no airflow. The fans d […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-22, 04:25:

Its the industries obsession in catering to gamers and their need for MOAR fans, MOAR rads space and unicorn puke RGB on everything, oh lets not forget tempered glass on all sides too..bleh, I dont see this ending anytime soon as it clearly sells cases.

I want the external 5.25 and 3.5 drive bays, I hate RGB unless I can control it without stupid bloat ware and even then prefer static colours that dont overpower everything.

That's also what I see happening. Then the case manufacturers smash the fans against the glass so there's no airflow. The fans do nothing but light up. Also, everyone copies each other, so there are only two basic case designs left (the full tower glass RGB abominations that every "content creation workstation" is built in or NZXT H500 clones).

I don't know if RGB lighting is what people actually want or if they only buy it because they feel like there's no other choice. If you don't like it, someone will tell you that you can just install the ridiculously bloated 700MB (or larger) lighting control software and turn them off. The software hooks itself so deeply into Windows that it causes random BSODs and maximum-severity security vulnerabilities, and each brand of control software conflicts with each other. That's fine, though. Everything is fine. Just keep consuming and everything will be okay. Things can't be that bad if you have RGB lighting. Just stare at the lights and forget about those remote access vulnerabilities.

More radiator space is essential today with the rapidly increasing power consumption of modern hardware. When your CPU draws 300W and your GPU draws 450W (with provision for up to 600W and rumors of 1000W power delivery coming), you need a lot of cooling. Even "mobile" CPUs can hit 150W, and my entire desktop (including both monitors) probably draws less than that. Modern hardware is depressing.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-22, 07:08:

eSATA is not a thing in modern system at all. That standard newer grew out of SATAII speed.

I've never seen anyone use eSATA.

Esata was a thing for a handful of years around Sandybridge times, but it wasnt very useful.

eSATAp is the new standard that combines USB2 and eSata into one port, it can provide both 12v and 5v power along with data and sata, not sure if its ever been on consumer boards since its more directed at servers.