What are all the bays for?

[1Cheap2Crazy]

I'm thinking of getting a new case, but what are all of the bays for? I thought you could only have 2 devices on the 2 cables for a total of 4 devices. So why do some cases have a dozen or so bays? I would like to hook up a CDR, DVD, and 3 hard drives, but how? If this involves a RAID(?) setup or something complicated, don't go into details. I can get by on 2 HDs.

Thanks

 

[Cuda1447]

Im pretty sure you can't hook up 3 harddrives at once, only 2. A master and a slave. Im thinking some of the bays may be for looks/fan spots and other stuff like that. Thats what Ive seen in alot, but Im curious to know the answer to this as well.

 

[fatbaby]

because some mobos support raid and some people like to have "multifunction" panels in their bays

 

[Cogman]

the bays are also for SCSI support. As it can have more Devices the IDE can.

 

[Pothead]

With an ata controller card, you can have 4 more devices

 

[Lucky]

I actually just sold it but up until a couple of days ago my tower computer consisted of:

Bay:
5.25
1: 5.25 bay speaker
2. Zip
3. CD
4. CDRW
5. Main Hard Drive cooler
6. Digidoc Fan control
3.5
1.RAID Hard drive 1
2.RAID Hard drive 2
3.Floppy disk


In addition, many folks have stuff like LCD's, additional CD's or DVD's, complactflash readers,etc. And yes, With an ata controller card, you can have 4 more devices .

 

[FlowerMan]

Things that take up 5.25" bays:

-hard drives
-cdroms
-cdrws
-dvdroms
-tape drives
-baybus
-LCD displays

You can have more harddrives by getting more IDE controllers (PCI) or SCSI (up to 15 devices per channel). My new Abit AT7 can support up to 12 IDE devices by itself, so you do the math The cases with many (10+) 5.25" bays or 3.5" bays are for servers.