Syba 5.25" Bay Adapter for Slim Optical Drive, 2.5" Trayless Rack for Hard Drives HDD SSD, USB Hub - SY-MRA55005

This is likely the best built multi-full-height-2.5" drive mounting solution on Amazon. There are others, if you're using nothing but SSDs, but at the price of SAS SSDs versus spinning rust SAS drives, as well as the diminishing redundancy caused by larger capacity drives, this makes a perfect solution for a decent RAID enclosure for one's desktop tower computer. Much less expensive than even many of the 8-drive SAS enclosures meant for smaller SSDs, and made of mostly metal construction versus the other ones out there. Throw in eight enterprise SAS drives of modest (~1.5-2TB) size and you've got a great solution for a RAID 5+0, 6+0 or 1+0 ultra-reliable or ultra-fast large-ish storage bin. Offload all those important files to a 10 or 20TB external drive that you take to off-site locations and you're pretty much covered for data integrity. As you grow and upgrade (who wants to spend $500+ each - that's $4000!!! - on eight 8TB SSDs today?) to large SSDs at a later date when they become more affordable, this enclosure will still work. One can have quite a large, reliable, fast storage bin with eight 4-8TB SSDs - all of which this hardware will accommodate. So far, so good, it looks nice and stays cool. If it continues to work well, I will grab a SAS extender and another one of these enclosures in the near future, as my old tower case has room for exactly one more.

So one more update, with original and first update below...After several months of random problems with hard drives failing, I was able to solve the problem with a higher powered power supply. This 5 bay housing was not the issue at all. Though I had no real help from Syba, I was able to determine that my problems started when I added an additional drive to the system, thus apparently surpassing the capabilities of the power supply. I'm not really sure why the problems only manifested with the drives in this enclosure vs the drives mounted in the case, but the bottom line is that this device works flawlessly now that power is sufficient.-----------------------------------Below is my original review. I am updating the review just over a year later because the device is failing. For a few months, I have had issues with drives failing in the unit. After replacing the drive, things would appear to work for a while. Now, replacing a drive will not work. Taking the drive out of this enclosure and directly attaching it works perfectly fine. So as nice as the hot-swap enclosure was, I feel it should last much longer than a year, thus I am reducing the rating of this product. It is virtually unusable at this point.-----------------------------Wonderful addition to my system! I run my old desktop as a backup server, and this allows me to have hot-swappable RAID drives. Only problem I had was not reading the manual thus not realizing there were power buttons under each drive which needed pushed after inserting the drive. So much easier than powering down a system and removing screws to replace a failed drive.Nice solid aluminum construction, no worries about breaking flimsy parts.

This is a nice space saver when you have a short chassis. Lian Li makes great solid enclosures for ATX boards but to get the space for the internal drives, power supply, and motherboard they sacrificed external cutouts. This trayless device lets you have cold storage for backups so that you can just push a drive in, do your backup, and then extract the drive. It has a nice feature of an on/off switch so that you can leave the drive in and turn it off so that your cold storage is still in the system but not powered on.One interesting thing about this enclosure is that to cram both a 2.5 inch trayless and 3.5 inch trayless into the space of a 5.25 bay they had to use a connector on the tray that isn't a true female SATA connector. It is a SATA connector with the top plastic part of the connector removed. As a result, when you insert the drive, the SATA contacts mate through pressure from the bottom without any way to mate with the connector on the top or to maintain a tight connection with drives that are thin. So far, Hitachi, Seagate, and WD 3.5 inch drives all follow a standard thickness and mate perfectly. But 2.5 inch drives vary in thickness and I found that my Corsair SSD is too thin and so doesn't maintain a tight enough connection to be reliable. A Samsung SSD is a little thicker and works just fine. A HGST mechanical drive that I pulled from a laptop is too thin to maintain a connection.The locking mechanism is very solid and it is spring loaded so it is easy to get drives out. The front LEDs are dual color so they change color when the drive is being accessed. The USB3 passthrough works as expected.I took one star off due to the way the drives connect unreliably without a true female connector for the drive. The enclosure is fully open from the top and I don't see any reason that a full female connector wouldn't have worked in the enclosure.