Mini Pc With Optical Drive

I am new to building PC with aftermarket cooler. Needed a wider case for DeepCool AK 620 which fit just fine. Case is very nice and allows more flexibility than I'm used to for cable routing and storage mounting options. Also mounted an optical drive at bottom front. When I put the magnetic cover over the optical drive it hits the button to open the tray. Not a big deal to me. Had a question about plugging 3 pin case fans into 4 pin connectors on motherboard but Fractal never responded to my ticket. Figured it out on YouTube. Would buy again.

I got it to preserve the use of a 5.25 drive in a new PC case with no optical drive slot. (The drive has old firmware, that allows playing of UHD BluRay disks.) I found the USB cable that came with it to be a bit short (24, 60cm). If you get a replacement, be sure to get the high bandwidth A/B type.

The Intel NUCs hit in (almost) every way for a mini PC. If you can use a small but powerful machine, definitely consider one of these. Here at B&H I got the barebones i3 kit (without the drive or any memory) and installed MS Windows, memory, and the drive myself. Two tips for self-installers based on the other reviews: 1) Pressing the power button for three but *not* four seconds takes you to a menu allowing you to set options like boot order, make sure LAN is turned on, etc. 2) If installing Windows 11, you might only need to download the wireless driver to a USB and run the driver installer from there after Windows install to get connectivity. Afterwards, Windows Update will help you take care of the rest of the drivers, BIOS updates, etc.

We just made the switch from a desktop PC, which contained several NVME SSD drives, to a Mac Mini M2 Pro. I chose these enclosures so I could continue using those drives for sample loading and audio file storage. If you have spare drives, this allows you to save money because you may not need to spend the extra dough to get larger storage on your Mac product. The form factor and the build quality are both perfect and we get about 900 mb/s transfer using the USB-C/TB4 ports, which is about 25% of what I get with the internal SSD drive on a my Mac Mini, but which is quite acceptable for this kind of drive and the applications for which I use it.

Great drive for PC

To protect and transport my G Drive mini.

Probably you won't use you Optical Drive anymore, you're in 2012 so just get this and add a second drive. It's amazing to buy this if you have an SSD and to keep you HDD. I use it in my Macbook Pro and rocks.

Added an SSD as my main drive and put my old Hard Drive in the Optical Bay. Don't use the CD Drive that much. Install was a piece of cake. Now I have more space for files/documents.

I use this to connect my PC to both a monitor and ATEM Mini Switcher.

Using in my new mini-PC setup and working as advertised.