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Hard Drive front plate

Such hard drives aren't uncommon (or they never used to be); they're half-height drives, as opposed to most 3.5" drives which are low-profile

I've got a bunch of old Seagate Hawk SCA drives that are like that, as well as a few floppy drives, including a Teac FD-235HF. Early Sony 3.5" floppy drives used the same half-height dimensions.

See here for an explanation
 
Chuck(G) said:
Such hard drives aren't uncommon (or they never used to be); they're half-height drives, as opposed to most 3.5" drives which are low-profile

I've got a bunch of old Seagate Hawk SCA drives that are like that, as well as a few floppy drives, including a Teac FD-235HF. Early Sony 3.5" floppy drives used the same half-height dimensions.

See here for an explanation
Click to expand...


Can you show me some photos of these in computers? How these were put in front? I mean, the only one I have seen was just "hidden" inside the computer.
 
Keep in mind that having a faceplate did not mean that the drive could only be mounted somewhere where it could be seen. It was not uncommon to mount a drive with a faceplate in a computer, then when the front cover is installed the face plate can no longer be seen (such covers exposing gaps to access removable-media drives like tapes or floppies but covering up the hard drive bays). The IBM PC AT is an obvious example of this.

Also some vendors would remove the manufacturer face plate (or more commonly, just order the drives without face plates installed) and install the drives into their own carriers. The Compaq Proliant 6500 for example had an exposed drive bay that could take 5 half-height 3.5" drives, or 7 low-profile 3.5" drives. I did a quick google search and found this page that shows such a system:

http://mike1023.com/mygeek/Mike1023/room/room_pic2.htm

In the picture he has 4 low-profile drives, 2 low-profile blank filler plates, and 1 half-height blank filler plate. Of course in this situation 'factory' faceplates could not be used and I'm sure Compaq ordered their drives without them seeing as how they were going to be installed into Compaq proprietary drive carriers anyway. Compare to the Dell computer on that same page that only has low-profile 3.5" bays, which were *much* more common. It became widespread practice to use the 3.5" bays for low-profile devices only (floppies and zip drives mostly, but eventually CF and SD card readers as well) on the assumption that if somebody did have a half-height device they could just use a 5.25" bay for it (even if they needed a 5.25" to 3.5" adapter). This worked out well enough because 3.5" half-height devices were relatively rare. Just hard disks and tape drives as far as I can recall, and only the tape drives needed to be in externally-accessible bays.

Basically 3.5" half-height external bays were a standard that just didn't get really popular in the consumer market. 3.5" HH was big for hard disks, but those could be mounted internally where nobody cared about faceplates (and you could save a few pennies by leaving them off). The last 'modern' system I can remember ever seeing a 3.5" half-height external bay on was the Dell PowerEdge 2950 server (the version that took 2.5" hard disks). The 2.5" disks were small enough to leave room for a 3.5" floppy drive (slim, the type found in laptops) and a 3.5" half-height tape drive. I found an ebay auction that has a picture of one of these (it's picture #3):

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Dell-295...n-5160-3-0GHz-4GB-RAM-DAT72-A56-/321767277461

(no affiliation with seller, it was just the first picture I found of a 2950 with the internal tape drive option)
 
AFAIK there are very few systems with an externally accessible 3.5" Half-height bay, that would accept a "standard" HDD face plate. The Epson Equity 1e has one on the bottom. In the image there is a thin filler to convert it to a 1" low profile bay. I think HP used an adapter for their early DAT drives that were 3.5" HH, that would fit that face plate. Later ones used an adapter, but the face plate covered the whole 5.25" area and the DAT drive. There are also 3.5"x1" face plates.
 
I took a picture of my own Proliant 6500 server and one of its three external drive cabinets (cropped the top part of the server to show only the 3.5" drive bays). Both of these cabinets were made to accept both low-profile and half-height 3.5" drives. The purple-handled drive sleds all have low-profile 3.5" drives and the gray-handled drive sleds all have half-height 3.5" drives.

The server actually has 9 drive connector slots in the drive backplane even though it takes a maximum of 7 drives -- there are 2 connectors each for drives #1 and #5 so that the drive can be positioned as needed depending on its neighbors. For example, for drive #1 you use the left-hand position if drive #0 is low-profile (which leaves position #2 available for another low-profile drive), and you use the right-hand position if drive #0 is half-height (which leaves position #2 unusable).

The expansion chassis doesn't need to use this trick of overlapping bays because there's enough room for 7 half-height devices. But the server only had room for 5 half-height drives -- to get 7 to fit, at least 6 of them had to be low-profile.

A bit off-topic but I thought it would be an interesting tangent anyway.

IMG_0462 25%.jpg
 
SGI Indigo is a fine example of a machine with externally accessible 3.5" HH drive bays, where a drive with such a faceplate would "fit".
 
CompuAdd's slimline cases had an external half-height 3½" drive bay:

s-l1600.jpg
 
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