Are those the same case? The second one looks like it has the 3.5" floppy at the bottom of the disk stack.

@another-dave At the bottom of the stack are the internal 3.5" bays. You can see the floppy cable going up out the top above the 5.25" bays.

Where is the time? I got rid of my last tower in 2013, I think. A 200 MHz Pentium Pro system with 256 MB of memory...

So long as the case will fit under a table or desk, having the case be taller is if anything an advantage, since it would reduce how far down someone would have to reach to insert or remove disks.

I can't say for certain that it would be reliable in that specific case with that motherboard, but I've seen similar systems used as CD duplication machines, where each bay was fitted with a CD-R drive.

The drive bays can't overlap the area for the full length PCI cards.

Some people/projects use a lot of PCI cards. I've seen some with 5 full length PCI cards. I can't remember what they were for but there is no way of fitting a disk in that area. All the disks had to go above the PCI cards.

@cup Graphics, sound, network, and RAID is already 4 without even getting into application-specific stuff like video capture cards, various kinds of accelerators, or something like IBM's S/390 "mainframe-on-a-PCI-card".

That’s far from the tallest - I had a Chieftec Dragon full-tower with 7x front 5-inch bays - total height was at least 80cm before adding the feet.

Lots of empty space is the opposite of today's extremely narrow laptops with no empty space, that suffer from overheating and swollen batteries.

@Dai my Caselabs SMA8 is similarly tall; and they had a similar case that was about 6"/15cm taller (enough extra vertical space for a 140mm radiator running front to back on the side of the case).

I have a machine with 11 front 5,25" bays, all of them occupied.

I would have loved that tower. At one point I had in my dual pentium PC (ASUS EISA neptune motherboard). It booted from an IDE drive, had 3.5 and 5.25 inch floppy. Connected to the Adaptec 2940UW controller were a Plextor CD player, a Yamaha burner and a TEAC DVD player. A 9GB IBM DNES, a 4GB IBM DCAS a Micropolis 9GB. I had to connect the SCSI Zip drive externally as there was no place to put anything more inside. My tower had 2 3.5 bays and 6 5.25 bays.

@pacoverflow There are plenty of smaller cases than this without overheating problems.

@user253751 not to mention this case despite its size is going to have lousy cooling compared to any halfway decent modern case: 1x92mm and 1x80mm (PSU) fans in the back, and what looks like 2 more 92mm fans in the front which are going to be hobbled by the paucity of holes in the front panel to draw air through. The larger volume will mean it'll take a bit longer to heat soak if you put modern high power components in; but just about anything with a pair of 120mm fans (1 intake 1 exhaust) should beat it in steady state temps because they can cycle the air so much faster.

You can copy 6 CDs at a time - Doc Brown would be impressed.

I had a case similar to this once (slightly shorter), with a CD ROM, floppy and maybe 4 HDDs. Getting all the ribbons correctly connected between drives and IDE controllers was pretty fiddly. You definitely needed a lot of space for them.

I am still looking at the picture trying to find out what is so unusual about it. Old age is a terrible thing, I guess.