In the past, it was common to find that PC cases incorporated racks with space to install up to 8 3.5 inch disk drives, but little by little we saw how these racks disappeared and now we rarely see models of boxes with them; in fact, even simple 3.5-inch drive bays tend to stand out for their absence, and it’s already common to see enclosures that only have one or two at most, as well as some models that s ‘even dispense with it. Are they destined to disappear?
Increasingly rare 3.5-inch drive bays
It is undeniable that today a new PC is no longer designed that does not have an SSD as the main storage unit in the system, and there are not few users who are already completely dispensing with 3.5 inch hard drives in their system because with the capacity of modern SSDs there is hardly any need for mass storage on a normal PC (and this is mass storage provided by 3.5 inch drives ).
However, it is not surprising that when people acquire a new PC, despite mounting an SSD as the primary system storage, they want to have at least a 3.5 inch drive to store their documents, videos. and heaviest images. 3.5-inch drives aren’t gone, and while they’re less and less common in home PCs, they’re still around, which means we don’t think 3.5-inch drive bays are PC cases will disappear.
Now what we think will disappear, except in models with very large boxes, are the disk racks like the ones you can see in the image above (it’s a Corsair Crystal 680X) which allows you to install a large number of storage units. Very few people already have several 3.5 inch drives in their PC and therefore the need to have many drive bays it is not necessary, which is precisely why it is increasingly common to find enclosures with multiple anchor points for 2.5 inch drives but smaller and smaller than 3.5 inch.
The summary of it all is that we can expect a decrease in the number of enclosures with 3.5in drive racks, but 3.5in bays will not go away until hard drives continue to be sold in this size. Now it is true that we will find cases that are already lacking in favor of 2.5-inch units, but in fact even these are missing in many models of cases already designed for modern PCs where storage is based exclusively. on M.2 Format units.
Therefore, if you are using 3.5 inch drives and plan to update your PC or buy a new one and keep using mechanical drives, don’t worry because neither will run out nor in the medium term, they will disappear (in the future, you might say, because market trends are constantly changing and evolving).
