RackChoice Internal Hard Drive Enclosure 3x2.5”/3.5” SATA/SAS Hard Drive Backplane 6 Gbps HDD hotswap in 2xExternal 5.25" Bay

The unit arrived in a trapezoidal shape, leaning to the right at the top. This meant that it was difficult to pull the trays out. I did manage to get them out and leaned on the unit to bend it to a more square shape after which the trays could go in and out fine. The power connectors are not the modern SATA L shaped type, they use the old 4 pin connector so I had to dig up those connectors in my modular power supply to get the power in. Plus they are very close together and it was a struggle to get the power connectors in properly had to compress the cables and try to get them in simultaneously. This is mostly due to the cable ends that my particular power supply uses. Once I opened the unit and pulled out a tray I found you have to screw the drives into the trays before you can use them. I have many drives and am used to just popping in one as needed. Once I got things situated with power and data connections I did find I could insert the one test drive and windows 10 (the os I tried this with) detected the drive as needed. Also tested eject and that worked as well. The drive trays could use a bit of sanding in the cutouts as they can be a little sharp so be careful on that. Other than that they do provide screws, and 3 sata cables I used my own stuff so didn't test them. I could live with the manual screw in tray requirements, and buy additional trays for some of my on the shelf drive units except these guys don't appear to sell trays by themselves. That means having to pull a tray, and unscrew and mount a new drive every time you want to swap one. Luckily, and I wouldn't belive this except it happened ;) The support guys offered and did ship me free of cost some extra trays. Top Notch. Changed my review to 5 stars.

If you are trying to make use of those old 5.25 bays and are looking for the most cost effective way to convert them into a hot swappable HDD/SSD bays look no further. People were complaining about the fan noise but they sounded fine to me.

Solid construction. Lots of screws and cables. The unit itself is quite long and sticks out from the 5.25” bays into the interior of the case longer than most 5.25” devices or a similar icydock that I have. My use-case for this was to add three 3.5” bays to the two 5.25” bays on a Lenovo P520 workstation, but the fan sticks out too far and into the RAM. I should have done my homework. Unfortunately, I will need to pivot on that plan and use this in another case.

I like the construction, but they have one fatal flaw, it's just slightly oversized in width and in height. I was using these to replace some old Icy Dock, but getting them into the case was a bear, I actually had to modify my case to cut off some of the drive supports, because the docks are just too high. Also the screws holding the metal panels to the plastic, the countersunk screw heads are not entirely flush, so scrape along the drive bay, and since they are already too wide, this makes them even tighter. The final problem was when I went to put on my front panel, I couldn't, because I had all my drive bays filled, and again they are just too tall, so there wasn't physically enough room to get the front panel back on, I would have had to cut on the front panel to get them to fit, which would cost a lot of money, if I could even find someone to cnc the panel, because doing it by hand is just gonna look janky. I had no problems at all with my old Icy docks in the same scenario. Looking at these docks, there could have sized these down just slightly, like 2mm in each direction, and still would have worked, because it's metal over a plastic frame. Probably going to have to return these.

Hard to install. It fits -very- tight.