Any hacks to add another drive bay?

[trots]

Has anyone ever jury-rigged their case to hold an extra drive after using up all available bays? Or maybe there's something commercially available to hang another drive? It seems like there's enough room below the bottom bay. I'm maxed out in my mid-tower (DVD, CD-RW, 2 HDs, Soundblaster Live! Drive) and now I'd love to add a Seagate Travan 20 internal tape backup. Any suggestions? How important is it for the slave HD to be screwed into the case?

I have a ATA/100 PCI card for my drives, giving me 2 open IDE slots, so that's not a problem. If I'm SOL, I may just run the cable out and sit the backup drive on top (it won't look as pretty as an external, but that doesn't bother me too much). But I sure would like to put it inside the case, if possible.

Unfortunately, a full tower won't fit inside my new (and not cheap) office desk.

Any ideas? Are you laughing?

 

[BA]

Internal tape? As long as you're just hanging it inside, under the hard drive cage, it shouldn't be too hard, just make up four things like this:
___
|o|
|.|
|.|
|o|
___

 

[Zach]

I used zip ties. You could also find/make thin peices of whatever kinf of metal you want, drill holes in their tops & bottoms, and hang the drive by screwing the metal onto the drive cage with an existing drive's screws/

 

[trots]

Ooh, "zip ties," are they those white plastic thingies with the ridges that police use in lieu of handcuffs sometimes? (not that I'd know from experience, of course) Sounds do-able, thanks!

 

[cavingjan]

if you don't use your floppy drive, you could replace it with the tape drive. I've always used two small pieces of sheet metal with some drill holes convert two hard drives as one mountable unit and put it back into the hard drive cage. Its worked well so far. I had one case that only had one internal drive bay but by flipping my hard drive on its back, I was able to mount it high enough that I was able to get to the screw holes for the second hard drive. They had about a quarter inch between them.

 

[Bignate603]

duct tape fixes everything, lol. i have an idea but you would need to cut four small pieces of sheet metal. You would need to cut 4 strips and have a hole at each end of each strip. You would unscrew all the screws on the bottom drive on your stack of drives and rescrew them with these 4 strips in there. These strips would then hang down low enough that the other holes could be used to fasten the drive you want to add. I don't know if that was clear, but it would work. PM me if you didn't understand, mind you i haven't tried this before, i'm just thinking it up.

 

[greg]

God bless you for asking.
Last year I was sisck of my pop corn maker WD drive and wanted to isolate all noise. I tried rubber grommets, but they made it go THUD THUD instead of Kkkk kkkkkk. Then I used and old floppy case to hang two drives. Absolutely silent and a year later they are fine.

PLASTIC

Better picture of the final product

and other neat stuff

other work

 

[jkersenbr]

My personal preference is drive rails in a 5.25" bay, but if you're out of bays too...

Here's an article I saw recently where a guy uses expansion slot covers to add internal hard drives.

Article

 

[Quickfingerz]

duct tape man!!!

 

[Hamburgerpimp]

JB Weld!