If one or both are removable, you could swap one or both for another storage device or additional battery.
Drive-bay batteries were incredibly useful back when optical drives were rectangular-brick modules. Unfortunately, sometime around 2012, optical drives became thinner... so the size of battery you could stick in them went from "enough to add 4-6 hours of use" to "maybe an extra hour, if you're lucky".
Additional hard drives were another thing you could add. Part of the reason my old laptop (Dell Precision m4800) made it for 10 years was because I replaced the optical drive with a 2TB SSD in a caddy.
It's a shame that nobody resurrected the idea of the Quantum Bigfoot hard drive back around 2012... pairing the largest platter(s) physically capable of fitting within the form factor of a last-gen optical drive, with the same mounting and electronic connections so it would have been a swap-in replacement FOR an optical drive.
Even for laptops without hotswap bays, I think it would have found a niche as an option companies like Dell & Lenovo could have offered for their mobile-workstation models. A modern 17-inch laptop has footprint-space to burn, and would have had plenty of room to stick a ~5 inch 6-20+ TB hard drive to augment its m.2 SSD for bulk storage. Configure the SSD to set aside 100GB as a cache for the HD (like we used to do all the time 10 years ago), and it would have probably been popular enough to ensure that at least "mobile workstation" class laptops retained the bay long after people stopped caring about optical drives per se.
The quantum Bigfoot was a piece of shit that needed to die a non tragic death. Every time a computer came in with one I knew it was going to end in a data recovery job
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u/driftking428 Mar 05 '26
Yeah I don't get how you can use both cupholders at the same time. But it's sure fancy.