Talk:Drive bay

Full-height
"They were 2" high..." Are you sure about this? I admit I'm bad at estimating, but that seems too small for these drives. --Ntg 04:10, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * It is, they'r ~3.5", I just measured them. Corrected as appropriate. Boffy b 23:15, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC)

LCD
Some people put LCD display into the 5.25" drive bay. The LCD display reports CPU fan rotation speed, CPU temperature, motherboard temperature, etc or other stuff.
 * Article system monitor.

Actual sizes
There must be standards somewhere regarding the actual sizes of these drive bays. But who would have them now? ---Ransom (--208.25.0.2 (talk) 20:07, 20 November 2007 (UTC))

Looking at the T13/1698D Volume 2 Revision 0 (ATA 8 Parallel Transport), it says it's 5.748" in width and 3.250", 1.634" or 1.020" max in height. This appears correct as on my system between sets of holes, it is a bit more than 1-5/8" (1.625"), and less than 1-11/16" (1.6875"). I do not have a caliper to take exact measurements to confirm. Though the spec I have does appear to get which end of a 5.25" CD-ROM drive has the connectors on wrong, so who knows how reliable this info is. (The also never updated the right header, but did update the left header for the spec version.)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.17.45.168 (talk) 09:16, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Not important at ALL: —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.240.240.35 (talk) 21:46, 9 February 2009 (UTC) This is a reminder to all the drive Bay is on the frount of the computer box!

There are three elements to the actual size, the size of the hardware (which is accurate as mentioned above). The second element is the size of the Bezel that goes on the front. The standard size of the Bezel is missing from the document. every manufacturer makes the Bezel a bit different. but they are offcourse using some standard and staying within it. This standard for the Bezel is hard to find. The third element is the opening or Aperture that the hardware slides into, which has to be a bit larger than the Bezel so the Bezel sits in it comfortably. That is also a missing mechenical spec that is hard to find. Another way to look at it is.. suppose you are building something that will take two CD-ROM drives in a Dual Bay, one on top of each other. How would you figure out the distance between the set of screw holes on the side of the CDROM between the two CDROM ? the Bezel and the opening size would dictate the true distance between the two screw hole sets on the two CDROMS. Off course you can use a caliper, or build larger holes so you have room to move.. but that not how you achieve perfection. It would be a great help if someone has the answer to the 2nd and 3rd elemnts above. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.196.179.117 (talk) 23:58, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

The cited SFF specs have the nominal dimensions. They are 5.75×3.25″ (by up to 8″ deep) for a full-height and half that (1.625″) for half-height. Obviously, look at the specs for tolerances (generally 0.025″). 71.41.210.146 (talk) 14:48, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

5.25 name
Why 5.25" has such name? It is wider than 5.25" `a5b (talk) 15:57, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Cause the size of the floppy disks that the drives used were 5.25" Letharin (talk) 11:46, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

5.25" Bays for Slot Loading/Slim Line Drives
Okay so I've been looking at compact computer cases recently and noticed that a few have 5.25" bays, but with the caveat that they're for slime-line optical drives. Do these have any kind of standard dimensions, if so, could someone please add them to the article? -- Haravikk (talk) 20:15, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

The 3.5" 25/26mm dimension is still in use.
E.g. Seagate seems to use 26.1mm/26.11mm for all Desktop-HDDs with 2TB or more and also some smaller capacity models. --MrBurns (talk) 21:05, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

PS: The specifications linked in the article mention 3 height dimension (17.80mm, 26.10mm and 42.00mm) and don't state that only the dimension of 17.80 mm should be used for HDDs. 42mm is obviously obsolete, but 26.10mm obviously not. --MrBurns (talk) 21:13, 25 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Hello! Well, 26.1 mm is the standard height for the vast majority of modern 3.5-inch HDDs, see this for example. &mdash; Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:54, 2 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Oops, look at that, Seagate still makes consumer-grade 3.5-inch HDDs as small as 160 GB, and packs them into sub-20 mm frames. I was under impression that frames thinner than the standard 26.1 mm died off together with those ancient slim Maxtor HDDs. &mdash; Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:01, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Dimensions given in "Form factors" do not match SFF standards
Some of the exact dimensions listed in the "Form factors" section appear to be wrong. They contradict themselves and the SFF standards.

For example, 3.5" bay width is given in the article, with an incorrect unit conversion, as "4 inches (100 mm)"; the actual linked standard says 101.60 mm / 4.000".

They should be fixed to match the standards. 73.202.12.249 (talk) 05:59, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

No source for the term drive bay
None of the references contain the word bay. Something should be referenced that states that these things are actually called drive bays. 88.112.62.49 (talk) 20:19, 16 August 2023 (UTC)