HDDRACK5 5-Bay IDE/SATA Hard Drive Organizing Rack

This is one of those products that you either need or dont. In my usage, I have a few internal hard drives and a modded case to allow SATA pass through outside. I doubt this thing can fit inside a computer case (it might though) but the way its designed, its a simple rack to hold 5 drives outside the case. Theres no backplane, no USB 3.0 conversion or anything, just simple walls of metal to hold drives. And it works perfect! With it, I can stick 3 external drives on here and put in a small spare PSU on the bottom and literally plug and play to my machine. The thing has anti-vibration feet and while the drive connections are somewhat solid (you connect them directly to the cage with screws and slide into a track), the plastic track keeps vibration down so its not noticeable. I barely hear the fan but you can always swap it with a noctua or something if you need be (standard 3 pin fan). For what it is, Id expect the price to be closer to the $15 dollar range, but its one of the few products that isnt overly-fancy or looks out of place on a desk (compared to those 5.25" 3.5 bay enclosures) so Im not complaining on price. Buy it if you need it, and trust that itll work.... long term usage, I have no idea on reliability, but since like 99.9% of the components that could fail are what I supply, Im not too concerned.

This is a great drive rack. I needed extra space for the drives for my server and this worked perfectly. I am using two of these to house an additional 10 drives for my server, and they work exactly as they should. The fan is quiet and keeps air flowing over the drives. The racks have a board connector which allows you to connect a power supply directly to the rack so you can use a standard PC power supply to power the drives and fan. I have 21 drives connected to my server, with room for a few more thanks to these racks. There are 14 drives inside my case and 7 external. I cannot recommend these racks highly enough.

I have a home brew Linux file server, and I needed somewhere better to fit my 5-drive setup (2x WD Green 1.0TB RAID-1 + 2x Seagate 1.5TB RAID-1 + 500GB system/boot drive). This rack did the job just fine. The setup was easy enough - simply screw in four thumbscrews per drive, then slide it into the rack's bay. The plastic snap was a bit tight for my WD drives, but my Seagate drives snapped in just fine. After being fully assembled, the whole enclosure feels pretty solid (no shaking drives, etc.). I opted to use a 200W power supply from a leftover case to owed these drives externally. The fan works decently, although it's definitely not the the quietest fan; however, it's just in a closet anyways, and the drives themselves combined are much louder than the cooling fan, so it's not that bad. My only complaint is that I wish the rack had some way to mount the power supply, so it's easier to organize and move around. A power supply just dangling around is neither the safest nor most aesthetic thing... But again, in a server closet, it's not that big of a problem. For the price, I probably couldn't ask for more, so I'd recommend this to anyone looking to expand their storage solution.

I moved my home server, as part of an OS upgrade, from a Frankenserver case to a new HP proliant m110 G7 with 4 internal drive slots. I had 7 drves in my existing server case, that used an internal cage to held 3 additional internal drives. The internal cage would not fit inside the new HP case. (I could have bored a single hole in base of that case and mounted just as this one is to the exterior of the HP case.) This cage has foam pads under its base. It firmly attaches to the top of the HP case with a single screw through the center of the cage's base plate. Once mounted, it is stable and firmly in place. The drive mounting screws slide into cage rails and are held in place by a mechanical locking pin. The cage came with a standard plug for attaching an auxillary computer power supply. I decided to remove that in favor of running a power cord from the HP's power unit within the case. I also bought a 1M SAS to 4 SATA cable to connect 4 drives within the case to my RAID card. I used the cage's 5th drive slot for a SATA drive, that is connected to a motherboard SATA port, for C: drive backups. I also added a 120mm fan screen to keep things out of the fan. All in all, this unit fit my needs to a "T." I might add side panels to dress it up some when time permits.

The rack certainly does what it is supposed to do; to hold 5 drives. But the need to add stand off screws to each drive before sliding it into the rack is counter productive. A ledge on which the drives would sit would be more useful. Also, if I need to secure the drive with screws, I'd rather use standard hard drive screws instead of the screws that came with the rack. I just know I'll lose the screws over time because I bought this as a test platform. As soon as I lose the second screw, I've lost use of one of the bays. The power supply switch is a nice touch though, and the rack is sturdy. I think that next time, I'll just buy some aluminim "L" stock and make my own.