540 Air Case disks

Hi all. I have had my case for about 8 months now and love it, nice design etc. I game and I also do a lot of photo editing and work with masses of RAW files. I have a SSD for windows 10 which is 480GB and it works well, I have x3 2.5" bays free but SSD drives are too expensive to store huge abouts of RAW files etc, and mech drives for 2.5" are too slow for me.

At the moment I have X2 3.5" black drives in the hot swap bays in the base of this case, but long term I am going to run out of space. I have plans to eventually buy x2 10TB barracuda drives and stick them in there, but I'd like to move the x2 2TB drives (or buy new ones for) the 5.25 inch bays. I've spoke to PC Specialist who built my system who have been very helpful and advised doing this rather than buying a whole new case with more trays and labour costs and changing the MB etc etc, and I think they are right as I basically don't use the DVD drive, so I have x2 free bays and will free up a sata slot on my MB.

I know the 5.25 bays on this case are tooless, does that mean I will be able to use products such as the below, my big issue is I seen someone say to just remove the tooless 5.25 bay things but I cannot for the life of me see how they detach, does anyone know. Also how would I screw in the x2 3.5 drives with the adaptor into the 5.25 bay, the screw holes don't seem to be accessible as they seem to be top down and that part of the case doesn't remove? :

http://www.ebuyer.com/229062-startech-5-25in-trayless-hot-swap-mobile-rack-black-hsb100satbk?reevoo_page=2#reevoo_embedded_reviews

http://www.ebuyer.com/124138-startech-5-25-sata-hard-drive-mobile-rack-drawer-drw115satbk

(would x2 of these work in these empty bays?)

or this one (cheaper etc and open plan but how do I get to the screws to screw this in?)

http://www.ebuyer.com/124153-startech-metal-5-25-to-3-5-inch-drive-adapter-bracket-bracket

Would be really interested to hear if anyone has done this. Potentially then I would be able to have circa 40TB of storage (in reality less I know) with these proposed mods and not need to change my MB. And eventually if that fills I could move to NAS but don't want to as of yet, wishing to keep it all internal for now. Please respond if you've did this mod, esp with pics! Thanks:biggrin:

I personally don't have any experience with those kits you listed, but what I can tell you is that as long as they use a standardized 5.25" size, they should fit in the drive cage and use the existing tooless hardware to lock them in place.

 

As a recommendation, I'd check with the HDD manufacturer to be sure you can mount the drives vertically as some drives may fail prematurely if they are mounted in this fashion

Thanks. I think most are okay, if you look at most NAS systems then a lot are vertical slotting 3.5 drives.

These hdd caddys will fit easily in the 540 cage with the plastic bay clips, I have had this one in mine now for over a year next to my DVD drive. :greengrin

Thank you for the post, you are in the UK like myself which is great. I might get two of these, would two fit in the 5.25 bay in the 540 I assume? I take it you now have 3 x 3.5 inch drives? If possible I plan to have 4-5 by adding two in the 5.25 bay and one in the back of the case. Do you think these bays will accept 10TB barracuda drives, I've heard they are thicker, do not know if that is true or not?

Yes you can put two together in the bays. I got the caddy because I do have a third drive, but also for other drives I use for my storage needs which I hotswap occasionally and I liked the idea of doing that via this caddy rather than removing the case window and one of my main drives each time for a hotswap.

I have no idea about the dimensions of the 10TB Seagate drives, my main drives are a 6TB WD Blue and a 3TB WD Black, they are standard size.

EDIT: I just looked up the Seagate specs and they do seem to be the same size as most other drives at 26.1mm height.