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

I bought two of the RackChoice Internal Hard Drive Enclosures on sale for use in a CoolerMaster tower with 6 exposed 5.25 bays. I run an UnRaid server with 10 HDD/SSDs and this is a perfect solution. As other reviewers have noted I had to make minor modifications to the internal bays of the CoolerMaster tower, bending some tabs out of the way to fit the 5-in-3 enclosures but otherwise it was a simple plug-and-play. No instructions needed. The enclosures have 2 Molex power connectors for redundancy, assuming you have two separate independent power rails and you choose to use them in a redundant fashion. Otherwise a single power connection from the PSU to the enclosure works fine. I am powering 5 HDD on a single power rail without issue using a 750W PSU. The HDD sleds require no screws to mount a 3.5 HDD, they just snap-in-place. For 2.5 SSDs screws are required and supplied with enclosure along with 5 SATA cables, but I chose to use my own cables. The sleds latch into place with minimal effort and hold the drives securely in the enclosure. The power and activity lights on each sled work as expected, so you can see at glance what bays have drives installed and when they are active. I did replace the fans in the enclosures with Noctua NF-A8 FLX 80mm fans as mentioned in another review. I have used Noctua fans in other builds and they are excellent and silent fans. It’s not that the stock fans are bad or excessively loud, but for my application and server location I wanted something a bit quieter and lower pitched. I think a lot may depend on your case size/design and the other fans installed in the case as to whether noise is an issue for you. The stock fans run at 2500rpm and in their favor they do keep the 5-in-3 enclosures a few degrees cooler then the Noctua NF-A8 that have set to run 1650rpm which is the middle speed. Even so my drive temperatures range from 29C to 34C under normal use after replacing the stock fans vs. 27C to 33C with the stock fans. Bottomline is that RackChoice Internal Hard Drive Enclosures are a good value and work well if you are looking to clean up you case and have easy access to your drives for replacement. Just to put a final point this: These enclosures are for internal use only. They have no internal controllers and are not a standalone NAS. Read the description carefully before purchasing.

Works as intended, very satisfied

Took a little while to arrive as coming from another country, build quality is excellent and works very well with my SAS drives /SATA card combination, hot-swap seem to be quite reliable and hasn't had any issues finding drive when inserted.

So that there is no doubt, this fits inside your PC case. The array takes up x3 5.25in bays. now to the unit itself, while its not made to HP standards of blade array quality, I am extremely impressed with this, i am now able to swap drives in and out of my PC at my pleasure, while it took about 2 weeks to arrive, [coming from over the Atlantic, to Scotland] it has been worth the wait, 5 good quality SATA cable included and a screw pack for the fitting of the unit and all the drives too. yes it takes desktop and laptop size drives. best 100 quid ive spent for a long time. you wont be disappointed.

This item has a major flaw: poor ventilation. The fan is incapable of adequately cooling five NAS drives. The fan is weak, and the grille might as well be a cork because it blocks most of what little airflow there is. I was getting drive temp > 40C in a 20C ambient room. I made two modifications. First, I cut the plastic grille out and replaced it with the typical wire fan grille. Second, I replaced the fan with a much stronger fan. It cools the drives adequately now, but it is much louder than it was originally. Drive temps max out around 36C under heavy load, and normally run under 30C. I have the fan on a thermal PWM that will ramp up the fan speed when airflow around the drives reaches 35C, which it hasn't needed to do yet. It'll happen later in summer. If this thing were properly designed, it would have one 120mm fan on PWM so that it could move enough air without the high-speed fan whine. If you put a powerful 80mm fan in it, as I did, the combined noise of the fan and the air whistling through the inadequate square holes in the backplane AND the NAS drives banging around is obnoxiously loud. Now I wish I would have bought a new case instead of this drive rack. Bottom line: I don't recommend this item because it won't properly cool your HDDs unless you modify it, which you shouldn't need to do. If you do modify it, it'll be loud. This thing only makes sense if you really do intend to hot-swap drives, otherwise just put the drives in bays like I should have done. It's a poor choice for a NAS.