SilverStone SST-FS303B - 3 Bay Aluminium Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack Backplane with Fan and Lock for SAS/SATA HDD, black

Bought this to house my two 1TB HDD's that hold games, photographs, video and music.My aim was to have maximum airflow from my front 2 intakes to keep my R9 290 cooler, by moving the drives up into the optical bays.This product does that - just.The item dimensions are listed as 19.5 x 14.6 x 8.5 cm but mine is more like 8.6 or even 8.7 cm tall.It sounds very fussy of me, but that fact is that the unit was too large to the double 5.25 bay in my Fractal R5.I was considering returning but decided to instead drill extra holes into the internal bay housing unit.This is invisible from the outside but means the bay is recessed into the front of the case by about 1.5cm.If you are mounting this below another unit such as an optical drive it will likely fit but beware if installing into a case with only 2x 5.25 bays like mine was - you will have to prepare yourself for a return or some DIY mounting. I may of had a bad individual unit but judging by the "tight squeeze" of the previous reviewer I would suspect that the factory needs to update its construction quality.Fan works very well, I can physically feel the air being pulled through on both sides of the unit, however it is a little loud.No problem for owners of cheap cases that get noisy anyway, or server computers in closets but I will certainly be replacing the fan with an 80mm Fractal and connecting it the case can controller soon.Unit is nice an heavy, mostly aluminium painted black construction with black plastic rear. Lights are nice and strong, unfortunately the bay doors are a little wobbly but this isn't an issue for me as I will likely never remove the drives inside.The fan I can overlook, but the bad fit and slightly wobbly bay doors for me justifies a 2.5giving it a 3 as im happy with the concept and it technically works.

Cracking piece of kit, really pleased with it. Using it on a FreeNAS 10 build with other internal disks making up a ZFS pool. Had a slight struggle slotting it into the 5.25" bay but that had more to do with the case. It actually looks good, makes the case look better than when there was just a CD ROM in there. If (like me) your case is constrained by not enough room for 6 disk drives then this little piece of kit will help you solve that problem. My case isn't big either and I'm using a mATX MoBo.

Used in homemade FREENAS Server to expand storage and worked a treat little tinkering to get it to fit flush in my Dell Machine but seems quiet enough and worked well!

Does what i need it to do.

It didn't fit my silverstone case it's a maybe 5mm too narrow meaning there's an ugly gap all the way round, I purchased a dishot and an icybox one and neither had this issue. After testing all 3 I settled on the icybox one and you probably should to.

Failed after a year causing massive read and write errors on all drives. Same fan problem as others as well. Not impressed.