Not enough internal drive bays on modern computers

I’m not sure if this question belongs here, but here goes…

I have an old PC that died this morning.  It had 4 internal HDD bays and I had them all filled with SATA drives.  It looks like all modern preassembled PCs ( Dell/HP/etc ) have only 1 or 2 internal bays.  Does anyone have any ideas ?

I’m not confident an external USB drive interface will be reliable 24x7

I’d prefer not to use a NAS since the internal SATA connection should be much faster than Gigabit ethernet

I could build my own PC but I’d rather just buy one that already works

This is for a media center type PC that doubles as storage for documents,home photos, and home movies so I don’t really want to go with a “server” type computer, just a regular windows one, hopefully around $500-$750.

My old PC was an HP d5000t

buy a computer case ?

probably be cheaper than spending that much on a new machine from a bad value oem.

cheap oem computers come with cheap parts… that’s why they are cheap lol

it’s usually cheaper to build your own factoring in what you get when comparing.

i’ve been doing corp and private computer repair work and builds / tech support etc

non stop for over a decade including work on a Canadian Govt HP machine.

and the last one i worked on was an HP laptop that i sent back fixed no charge to an old friend

with no fee / cost to them with huge smiles at th ework i did :slight_smile:

The one before that is another old friend who had a Gateway machine die on him.

and i suggested buy a new one for 400/500 or spend less and buy parts and fix it.

told em he would not need anywhere near that much to fix it, he insisted on giving me 175$

i got him a replacement motherboard for 30$ (50$ after s/h) on ebay that came with a cpu i didn’t need

and i gave em a spare gfx card as an upgrade and fixed it and gave it back basicly.

I build my own computers obviously but i had a family member give some case with fancy lights

and stuff on it back in like 2004ish and i have used the same case ever since… back then it cost about $80

and it was a good investment because i have since put countless motherboards and hard drives inside of it.

so you might wanna consider just buying a new case and reusing as many of your old parts as possible unless you want something newer etc ?

the nice thing about this is when its time you can upgrade easier and cheaper.

look at places like tigerdirect or newegg and you will see you can get your self a nice case for really cheap !

Thanks for your response.  I took your advice and built my PC.  First time doing that after buying them for 20+ years.  It really wasn’t too hard.  Mostly it took a lot of time thinking about exactly what I wanted and researching customer satisfaction with different motherboards, cases, psu, etc.   So far it’s working great and I have 6 internal bays.  Other than fear of frying the motherboard or CPU, it was easy.  But it did take me a few days.  If I were to do it again, it would only take a few hours for the hardware.

cool thats good to hear. and i wouldn’t worry specificly about frying the cpu… technology has changed over the years now so that they will shut off and prevent you from doing damage at a certain safe temperature set internally… for example my core 2 duo by intel will turn off at about 100 farenheit i think its is.

where as older chips would simply burn up and be paper weights :frowning:

not sure about AMD though but i *think they act the same way… The reason this might be good is if your were putting it together and forgot to plug in the cpu fan or if it died on you etc.

I have a better quad core amd cpu but just don’t have the motiviation to bother getting a motherboard for it the board for my C2D is awesome (spent $270 for it on Tigerdirect.ca)

Anyway, the advantages for building your own is endless and its not really that hard if you can look up on the internet how to do some things if you need help.