New 180mm case fans

[Edward Ng]

One word:

Vornado

[~El~Jefe~]

yeah thats wigga crack man. wigga crack.

word.

[DryFire]

That fan would most likely go on the side of a case.

I'd like to see a P-Q curve for that thing.

[Straker]

And of course, there's a reason why "half-height" drives are called "half-height". Guess how high they used to be!

Yeah, 2 full-height 5.25" drives on top of each other are pretty much the same size as a Shuttle case. I still have a half-height 2 or 3GB SCSI drive somewhere, remember our current drives aren't even half-height (1.5" high I think?), just "low profile".

Also, like with cards, some CD-ROM drives etc used to be longer (that is, front to back). I don't remember which it was but one of my older drives or burners was a good two inches longer than a new one at the time, difference might even be larger now, can't remember when that was.

Different audience now too, 10 years ago people expected computers to come in big beige boxes, there was a long long period when even sexy Macs all had a dozen+ drive bays total. I guess most users would have been more likely to simply spend more to begin with too. I never bothered buying a CD burner when they were $2000+ since I knew more than a few people that already owned them, seems funny to think I was still an early adopter when I got one a few years after that. For a while, separate/multiple CD burners and drives (since old burners used to read fairly slowly... and burn slowly), and CD changers (for servers, same reason + HDs expensive) were all really common too. Now all magnetic and optical drives are disposable, pisses me off.

I did like when SCSI and having separate controllers for everything were really common, but I guess as the user base has grown so large (and computer equipment has gotten so ridiculously good and inexpensive, to be fair), mediocre has become good enough for most users. Anyways, reward for anyone that bothered reading this far: ~8 years ago one of the small computer stores I used to buy lots of stuff from always had this absolutely ridiculous case on display. I don't know/remember what the price tag was or whether it even supported ATX or if people actually bought them, but it was a >36" case. I'm pretty sure it was even larger, but I'm not 100% sure, and for the next reason, 36" is more than enough anyways. The really stupid thing is that, aside from width, it was still to proportion, that is, it was (say) 36" deep, 36" tall and ~8" wide, and beige. Just like an ordinary case but with tons of wasted space, had no special arrangement of stuff inside the case even, so I guess you'd have to make your own brackets etc if you wanted to actually use most of the space. I guess that also meant SCSI would have been mandatory just to get from the motherboard to drives in the front of the case and stay within specs.

edit: so as to not be totally off-topic, i'd love some sort of standard for >120mm fans, such that you could buy and use one as easily as a 120mm today. like others have said, 180mm or so would be fantastic for intake fans or smallish heater cores.