StarTech 5.25in Trayless SATA Hot Swap Mobile Rack for 3.5in Hard Drive

I work from home, doing computer security for several organizations. To do this, I have to be able to use systems like my clients use. In order to not have a couple dozen computers in my office at home, I need to swap out hard drives, one for each client. This removable drive bay device lets me do this with a minimum of muss and fuss. I think the manufacturer of this device intended for it to be used with "data" drives, rather than with the system main drive. That's why it would have hot swap capability. I don't use it this way, but instead use it for the main drive. So I haven't tested the hot swap capability. My "lab" computer is a small form factor, so it only has one exposed 5.25" bay. I replaced the CD/DVD drive that was in that bay with this device (I use a USB CD/DVD drive for that purpose. This leaves the computer's original hard drive with my personal operating system and data in place. To use my own drive, as the computer boots up, I open the system BIOS and then select "Drives". Then I enable the SATA 0 drive and disable the SATA 1 drive. To use a client drive, I enable SATA 1 and disable SATA 0. The computer case stays buttoned up and things look nice and neat. I haven't found any negatives on this removable drive device yet. It holds the drive completely inside the computer case, so everything looks clean.

It works as described.

First of all, you have to understand that there is great value to being able to simply slide a spare drive into your machine, clone, and then remove it. Advantage 1 is that a backup doesn't do you much good if its in your machine, and the whole machine gets fried by an electrical surge. Second, cloning often takes 1/2 the time of making a "disk image". But in modern operating systems, you can't really have identically cloned drives in the machine simultaneously (barring raid controllers of course), so for cloning OSs like XP, you need to be able to remove the drive after the clone is created anyway. Before Serial ATA drives, it was pretty easy to get a tray type 'slide in' solution for a backup IDE drive, though you still had to go through the extra step of installing the drive into the removable drawer. When the serial ATAs came around, there wasn't anything like that for a while. There seem to be a few now, but what I like about this one is you don't have to 'install" the drive in a separate drawer like enclosure. Rather, you can just open the tray (installed in your desktop), slide in the Serial ATA drive, and close the door. What could be easier? (of course, all disk swapping should still be done with the machine powered down). The physical construction seems a bit flimsy, but it certainly is adequate to the task, and seems to work flawlessly every time. As others have commented, the drive comes with an activity LED that terminates in a connector, and is fairly useless unless your motherboard has a pair of pins specifically to support an external activity LED. So that was a feature that wasn't really thought out. But other than that, its a great solution to making the process of making backups, and then moving them to a safe location.

I have been using this rack in Windows 7 with 1TB Western Digital drives. This device actually works better than I expected. You don't have to use much force to open and close the door so swapping drives is effortless. The drive slides very smoothly in and out of the rack. It appears a bit flimsy out of the case due to the rubber mounts, but is solid once installed. There's a drive activity light, but the only reason to use this is if your case lacked its own--and even then it would show activity on any drive connected to the mainboard and defeat the purpose. I can see how this might present a problem for some people that might want to safely remove the drive in the rack while having activity on other drives. This isn't an issue for me personally so I did not take off any stars, but this is definitely something to consider before purchasing. I'm not sure if other racks offer a better solution, but I would imagine that might add additional cost to the unit. My only complaint is one of aesthetics and is very minor. The transparent label you see on the right is easily removed, but the silkscreened image on the left is permanent. I would have liked a clean faceplate. I would definitely recommend this product.

It's a little flimsy but it works. I needed to be able to switch drives so I could use different operating systems. It worked great for that purpose.

This was a replacement for a similar item made by another company. It's supposed to be "hot swappable" and most definitely is not. You can remove a drive while it's powered on, but if you insert another it will power up...it just won't be detected. So you end up having to reboot anyway. Could this be a problem with my setup? Maybe. But the previous rack that I had was hot swappable installed in the same PC. Also, I have noticed one issue that is slightly concerning. Sometimes a connected drive will suddenly power down, and then immediately power back up randomly, causing the drive to make a loud noise. The PC has no power-saving features enabled, so this should not be happening, and it happens with multiple drives. All of these are over 4 TB. Another review mentions that drives over 4 TB do not work well with this rack, so that may be why this happens. It's like the drive is being disconnected from the rack randomly. Beside these issues, the rack does work well most of the time with smaller drives (1 and 2 TB) but I don't use it as much as I would if it did not have the issues.

While I've only had this product installed for a couple of weeks, I will start off by saying that it works precisely as intended. I did expect the build quality to be a little better than how it actually is, even factoring in its meager price. But from a price-to-performance standpoint, this product is a relative steal. HDD insertion and extraction is simple and smooth. When an 3.5 drive is inserted and the bay door is fully closed, the door access can be key locked to avoid accidental removal during use or removal by curious hands (especially little ones!). I purchased this unit after trying (and failing) multiple times to create a Linux Mint / Windows 7 dual-boot system. Even with SecureBoot inactive, the Linux GRUB boot loader refused to load Windows even though it recognized and listed it in the boot menu. As such, I reverted to my original idea of a hardware-based physical OS swap method over a less reliable logical/software-based method. And I must say that using an old-school 'game cartridge' style drive swap methodology is far superior (from a reliability standpoint) to a logical bootloader method. At least this way if the boot sector of either drive has some issue, it won't take both OS's with it so I always have a backup OS. Brilliant! I would definitely recommend this product to the budget-minded DIY PC user.

Simple install. Convenient for swapping drives. Not sure I'd "hot" swap. Door is a little delicate. Using 3 of these in my desktop tower. Very satisfied.

Does exactly what I hoped. Accepts and ejects drives easier and smoother than I thought it would.

Je suis très satisfait de se tiroir, solide, très léger (un plus quand la tour fait déjà 7Kg) Le prix lui convient très bien. Aussitôt reçu, aussitôt installé. La boite est en carton bien rigide, juste le temps de lire la notice (en anglais) et en 5 min le tiroir était en place. Il est livré avec ses vis de fixations et un jeu de clé. Le disque rentre parfaitement dedans, pas de frottements (sauf si la tour n'est pas parfaitement posée à plat), la porte se verrouille très bien on entend un "clic". Seul point négatif, la prise d'alimentation S-ATA à un petit jeu, cela vient peut-être de mon connecteur, mais pas de quoi couper l'alimentation. La porte est en plastique, ne pas l'ouvrir comme un bourrin ou je ne donne pas cher au plastique, mais on prend soin et on ne l'ouvre pas tout les jours. Je compte en racheter 2 comme celui-là, c'est un très bon produit, ne pas hésiter.

Great quality product, fits the 5.25 drive slot perfectly and no issues with inserting and removing hard drives from the bay. I didn't opt to plug in the activity light, since it's not really necessary for my purposes. The lock itself is low security, being a generic mechanism, without unique key patterns. The closing latch feels secure and the air vents are a nice touch.

Lo he instalado en un ordenador con Windows 7. En cuanto a la instalación todo perfecto, he usado el primer cable SATA que he encontrado en un cajón y ha encajado perfectamente. El funcionamiento no da ningún problema, al introducir un disco duro Windows me lo reconoce como cualquier otro dispositivo de almacenamiento externo, y para sacarlo utilizo la opción de "quitar hardware de forma segura". Por lo que cuesta, vale la pena tener uno para aprovechar esos discos duros que se nos van quedando viejos.

Fungerade inte alls i min pc. Skickades tillbaka.