Syba Full Metal 8 Bay 2.5" SATA HDD & SSD HotSwap Backplane Cage for 5.25 Drive Bay

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.

I purchased this to put in my watercooled home file server for the drives I was using in a Dell PE R710, which was just using way too much power. It fits well in 2 x 5.25" bays, hooked up seamlessly to my PERC H710 controller and recognized my existing arrays flawlessly. It's a very sturdy build even though it looks like they simply put 2 of the 4 x 2.5" cages together (smart designing!). It houses 6 x 5TB Seagate drives and a 400 GB SSD for the OS - the drives are kept cool and the lights on the front indicate activity as well as online status. I haven't had any fail, so I'm not sure if that is indicated by the LEDs.I had a minor issue where the screws were too short, and I'm not sure if it is from short screws or my cases 5.25 cage being bent from using a different 5 x 3.5" cage, but using a longer screw to initially tighten the connection fixed that problem.

Excellent product. Easy install. Mount it, plug up SAS to SAS cables from SAS/SATA controller and Sata power cables. I mounted 8 1TB SSD drives as a Raid 0. And it was off and running. Makes drive replacement a breeze. Comes with keys to lock and unlock drive doors to prevent accidental opening and all mounting hardware. It will hold SSD or the small drives like what is used in a laptop, 2.5 inch. Got great customer service, first unit failed with a fan which only mechanical piece of unit about 28 days after install. Called Amazon and Vendor and they had a replacement to me in about 2 days along with return labels for the failed unit.

one of the bays wouldn't recognize drives, but otherwise awesome for the amount of drives in the provided form factor.

Did the job beautifully for my NAS. Mini SAS went right to my card and it's happily running FreeNAS with 5TB in Raid Z.