For many years, practically a decade and a half, a phenomenon has occurred in the world of PC towers. And it is that the sector has almost completely neglected the use of 5.25-inch drives where the CD or DVD reader was installed, as well as those intended for BluRay. Why doesn’t a PC tower now include them?
There are several reasons and many have to do with the laptop industry, a topic that we covered recently, but at the same time there are different factors that are personalized in a PC tower and in an industry that was looking for something more.
CD and DVD drives in a PC tower, something almost extinct
It is not impossible to find a PC tower with 5.25-inch bays, many manufacturers still include them, but the models are really scarce. The main reason for giving up an entire sector to something that was essential at the time could be summed up with one word: evolution, but let’s go with the nuances.
disuse of storage media
The first reason is the same that occurred in laptops, the disuse by users and industry of a storage method such as CD and DVD, and even BluRay . The industry went to a better life because users stored more and more on pen drives, internet bandwidth improved a lot around the world and streaming prevailed. Therefore, why continue to use this fragile storage method? The CD or DVD reader stopped making sense and with it the manufacturers of PC towers decided to do without these bays.
improve cooling
There are not a few of us who at the time and with the 5.25-inch bays used them for other purposes, such as trying to improve the cooling of the PC or putting water pumps in them.
The vertical space that was no longer used for the reasons described was used by the manufacturers to make perforated front panels with support for fans, in such a way that a new air flow system was created that benefited the PC components and also got another key factor that we will see next.
The aesthetics, the PC tower and the reader
A front full of fans and perforated to a greater or lesser extent gave free rein to the imagination with the inclusion of RGB on the market and its subsequent expansion in the fans. In addition, plexiglass was replaced by tempered glass, which improved aesthetics across the board and increased sales as users were more receptive to buying nicer hardware.
Due to this, any self-respecting PC tower today complies with all or any of the sections described here that were chained over time to find the chassis that we currently have on the market and that are undoubtedly much better than those of 15 years ago, both in quality of materials, and in functionality as well as in aesthetics.
The only problem is that the result of this equation is a greater increase in the average price, despite the fact that there are brands that compete from below with everything mentioned here, but this segmented the market into very different ranges with prices from a few euros to hundreds .
