this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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Those things are clearly meant for laptops. It's always awkward to hook them up to tower PCs. Either you're bending the short cable to stick them in the top chassis ports and the cable tension pushes it halfway off the case, or your are letting the drive dangle from the back panel ports.
I kinda miss the beefy boys that came with detachable USB cables and their own power supplies.
USB extension cables exist. I have lots of slim external drives and i've never had an issue.
I just looked up an external 5.25" enclosure for sata disc drives. Nearly $50 and doesn't even include a drive. That's crazy.
I've got this idea of putting a slim bluray burner in my machine. I got the bay adapter that houses that and 2 2.5" drives but haven't finished the thought by actually getting the burner. 🤷 It's probably pointless though.
The portable BR RW I found last year has a USB-C connection on the drive so you can use whatever cable you want.
Though they do make USB extension cables so you don't have to bend it weird.
I do still miss the chonky boys though, but the nice thing with USB-C is that it doesn't needs a separate power cable and plug.
I had an external SCSI CD-ROM drive that used caddies and had physical buttons on it, I used it for a long time as a CD player. It ran off 120.
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