I recently came across a computer tower being thrown out at my hospital and I want to repurpose it for Plex and Jellyfin. I have experience building computers, but I'm a bit puzzled about the front "cage" that has trays. Can someone explain the purpose of these trays? I'm planning to swap out the motherboard and power supply but I'm wondering if I can just use these trays for extra hard drives, or if they're designed for a RAID setup. Any insights would be appreciated!
1 Answer
That front cage is likely for hot-swapping hard drives. You can definitely use the trays to hold extra hard drives, even if they’re not connected. It’s a handy way to have drives on standby! Just a heads up though, if you were hoping for RAID functionality, that'd require specific connections that this setup might not have. So, you could set up something like software RAID instead, but the trays themselves are flexible for storage.
That makes sense! I wasn’t sure if I was missing something important with those trays. Thanks for clarifying!