I have a Corsair Carbide 500R and I have two SSDs, two HDDs, and a DVD drive. I didn't like stacking my HDDs directly on top of one another so I have a gap between the HDDs. Because of this, I needed to use two hard drive cages.... well, I needed to use two anyway with 4 drives. This is what the hard drive cage looks like for the 500R, and the 500R has two of them:







I've started toying with the idea of putting either both HDDs or both SSDs on the two 5.25" bays I have available. Has anyone done this? I wonder if it's best to put the SSDs up top or the HDDs? I currently have my SSDs on the bottom cage and HDDs on the top cage under the reasoning that the SSDs are cool and the HDDs can get warm/hot so I didn't want the HDD's warm/hot air floating up to the SSDs and possibly damaging them. However, the 5.25" drive bays don't have any active ventilation for that area but the hard drive cages sit just behind the front intake fans... so should I put the SSDs on the 5.25" bays and basically sit in a warmer environment while my HDDs get ventilation? Or should I put my SSDs in the cooler, ventilated environment and leave the HDDs up top where it's warmer?

I'm thinking of getting these adapters, but they'll only work for the 3.5 HDDs. I may need another 2.5-to-3.5 adapter if I'm putting the SSDs up top.

FWIW, I have 2 HDDs and 1 SSD. They all sit in the cage together at the bottom behind the intake fan. The SSD is in the gap between the 2 HDDs which have 2 empty bays between them (and actually it's just lying there dangling by its cabes because I didn't bother to buy a kit ).
Since my SSD is my system drive, the 2 HDDs are only used for specific programs or storage. They shut off when they're not in use, which keeps their temps down. I have no concerns about heat from those 2 WD drives, the lower of which is a slow Blue drive that I know is cooler than the upper one that's a Black.



The Jedi Master

How do you shut them off? My two HDDs contain my documents/pictures/movies/etc. and one has the non-speed-critical stuff like Helios and YAME, so even when gaming, I've spread the workload around that 3 if not all 4 drives are working (OS, game, cockpit extraction).

I've had my Samsung SSD go bad on me just recently and there's nothing I can really blame except the heat from the HDD... and at that point, I only had one drive with was at the bottom, then the Samsung, then the Crucial SSDs on top, all in one cage. The Crucial SSD was older than the Samsung too!

Yes I do this too. I dont have an internal dvd so I skip slots for air space and I have fans blowing air on the drives. I think I have 6 in there. I hate to have extra drives just sit on a shelf.

I had an extra usb 3.0 external drive that I attached to the motherboard.

The drive just sits on top of one of the HDD.

Go to power options in control panel, change your plan setting, then click Change advanced power settings.

The advanced settings window that opens has a lot of fine tuning stuff, much of it laptop-specific, but HD behavior is there. Pick how many minutes of idle time before it powers down and save it.



The Jedi Master

What are the advantages of powering off a HDD, aside from lower power consumption?? Longer HDD life? Anything else?

Heat, noise, power usage (more critical in a laptop or when on a UPS usually), and longer life, probably in that order. At least for me.

The downside is there is a delay as it spins back up when you need it again. In a game, this can result in a sudden freeze for a couple of seconds before the data comes off. SSDs do not have this.



The Jedi Master