Optical Drive Enclosures

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Edworld
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat Apr 09, 2016 2:50 am

Optical Drive Enclosures

#1 Post by Edworld » Fri Sep 04, 2020 4:40 pm

I have 3 optical drives and would like to have them all in one enclosure that holds all three. Are these enclosures available? Googled but couldn't find any

Thanks

Woodstock
Posts: 10331
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

#2 Post by Woodstock » Fri Sep 04, 2020 5:07 pm

It will be cheaper to buy a tower case that has lots of 5.25 slots in it. That would also allow you to do straight SATA hookups, although you might want a separate SATA expansion card.

Edited to add: Even finding tower cases with 3 or more 5.25" open bays is hard now. I've old cases with as many as 6, but 4 is unusual now. Lots of 3.25 or 2.5 slots buried inside...

silou
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:16 pm

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

#3 Post by silou » Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:13 pm

3-Bay SCSI enclosures might work, but you need to change the cables inside the enclosure. ESATA cables could be a solution

dcoke22
Posts: 3101
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:25 pm

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

#4 Post by dcoke22 » Fri Sep 04, 2020 10:09 pm

There's nothing magical about an enclosure for an optical drive. If you're handy you could build a box out whatever you've got lying around. Or just get some foam tape and tape them together in a stack. Then use a SATA to USB converter to power and connect them to your computer.

https://www.sabrent.com/product/USB-DS1 ... b-support/

For what its worth, I have one of these https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3UKIT/ It looks nice and three could easily be stacked up.

Like silou suggested, if you can find an old enclosure for 5.25 inch drives, which were common 20 years ago, you can probably take out the innards which are probably SCSI or IDE or something less than useful today and use SATA to USB converters to get the drives connected.

chiekku
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:18 am

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

#5 Post by chiekku » Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:44 am

Just got this in today and it works great with my BC-12B1ST:

OWC Mercury Pro
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3UBDRW16/

A couple of issues with it:
- Not an exact fit for my drive; drive is slightly too long, so I had to bend the metal tabs a little to line up the screw holes
- Need to reboot Windows to get the drive to show up if it's power-cycled

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