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Optical Drive Enclosures

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 4:40 pm
by Edworld
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

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 5:07 pm
by Woodstock
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...

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:13 pm
by silou
3-Bay SCSI enclosures might work, but you need to change the cables inside the enclosure. ESATA cables could be a solution

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 10:09 pm
by dcoke22
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.

Re: Optical Drive Enclosures

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:44 am
by chiekku
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