Device Bay is a technology that enables adding and upgrading peripheral devices without opening the chassis and without turning off or rebooting the PC. Device Bay also enables peripheral devices to be easily swapped between platforms.
The Device Bay Interface Specification is an industry specification co-authored, jointly owned, and managed by the Compaq Computer Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation. This introduction and overview to Device Bay is based on Draft Revision 0.79, dated June 30, 1997. Availability of the Device Bay specification will be announced on the web site at http://www.device-bay.org.
The Device Bay specification defines an architecture that supports hot swapping of devices and interoperability of peripherals and platforms. A bay can be built into the chassis of any PC system that meets the operating system requirements plus all the requirements for connector receptacle, bus interface, mechanical form factor, connector receptacle, power and thermal, and controller logic as defined for bays in the Device Bay specification.
The bus interface requirement is crucial. Device Bay devices must use one or both of the industry-standard extensible bus interfaces: IEEE 1394 or USB. These buses provide a broad range of bandwidths and scalable performance to support the requirements of PC peripherals for at least the next five years.