ICY DOCK 2 Bay 2.5" & 3.5" SATA HDD/SSD Hot Swap Mobile / Caddy / Docking for External 5.25" Bay | DuoSwap MB971SP-B

I was reworking my NAS and needed a trayless HDD backplane. These are GREAT. Well built and good design. These allow 3 HDDs in a 2x 5.25 inch bays of a PC case. Drives are plug and play. The front opening have hinged lever doors to block the air when no fan in plugged into that section. The fan speed can be adjusted by a thumb wheel accessible from the front, which I keep on high. I have never had a HDD get too hot. The cooling thermal design on these are fan-tastic.I also have one of these in a PC that I use for testing drives for bad blocks and erasing. In that one, the ports are set for AHCI for hot-plugging. My old Athena NAS backplanes (with screw mounts) would occasionally drop a drive about every 6 months. That has never happened with the Icy Dock backplanes, and I have used these for several years now. This makes working with HDDs very easy.Note: unplugging a spinning HDD gives the rack a mechanical shock, so be careful. My old Athena backplanes have a release button, but that also creates a shock. It would also be nice to power down an entire backplane with a simple switch when doing server maintenance. The Athena backplanes had a front switch for each HDD.

I have been a tech for a long time, and always seem to be swapping drives or testing them or whatever using USB docks, cannibalized portable enclosures, or opening the case... But when I built my new Linux gaming PC I wasn't going to continue that and I went on a hunt and found this device and after reading reviews, ordered it.It is quite sturdy and solid, although I was surprised the top of the drive was wide open and at first I had an issue with spare power cables getting in the way until I moved my optical drive to be immediately above it. I have inserted and removed dozens of drives and there doesn't seem to be any issue with build quality or longevity being an issue. I know other reviews mentioned that they had issues ejecting various drives, but even with the thinnest 2.5" SSD drives, I have not had any issues. I am not going to bother talking about the backside connectivity, that has been mentioned in many reviews.The independent power and eject buttons are a really nice touch, although I will admit at first I didn't understand why there were two circle buttons and two rectangular buttons, it seemed like an odd contrast, but after using it I understand... the circles are for the 3.5" drive slot and the rectangles are for the 2.5" drive slot.I was mildly surprised that I could boot from drives installed in the dock as well by selecting them as boot devices in the UEFI/BIOS boot select menu, a very handy feature for someone who likes to test out different operating systems or occasionally (even though I don't like too) boot up Windows.I do want to touch specifically on some Linux issues though. When I first installed this and booted up with no drives in it, I was on the desktop and popped in a 500GB drive and... Wait for it a minute... Maybe a minute more... Nothing... No pop up, nothing in drive manager or anywhere in /dev/sd* to mount, just nothing but the drive spinning up. I popped in a 2.5" drive that I knew was good and the same thing occurred, meaning nothing happened at all. I was a little perplexed by this since these are nothing but standard SATA drives on a standard interface. I poked around in the OS, ejecting and reinserting, trying different things but nothing worked. Finally, although this isn't normal Linux behavior (Linux doesn't normally need a reboot for anything), I rebooted the system with the drives installed to see if the BIOS recognized them, which it did, so I continued to reboot into Linux Mint, and low and behold they were there now! I mounted them, read/wrote, tested, formatted, re-partitioned, etc and everything worked fine. At this point I was worried I would have to reboot every time, but that was not the case. I tried several different drive, rebooted with drives installed and with the bays empty, and had zero issues going forward. I don't know why I had the initial problems, but they are gone and the unit now works as expected. The best guess I have is that something needed to be created in /dev before they could be used, and it was the first time it wasbooted with drives installed.Anyway, I am extremely happy with my purchase, I would buy this again, and would recommend it to others. I likely will try other ICY DOCK products if the situation arises for them.

On the plus side:Absolutely correctly sized. I installed it into a 2x5.25 empty bay and it fit perfectly. My drives are working as expected. It's doing exactly what I wanted - 3x3.5" drives in a 2x5.25" bay that I can hot-swap when needed.Neutral:The fan is LOUD, even at it's lowest speed. Plan on buying a good aftermarket 80MM quite fan if that's an issue for you. There's a fan speed dial to manually control the attached fan speed. A thermally controlled fan would have been MUCH better.The negatives:Although it says "Full Metal Chassis" this item is mostly plastic. The drive insert slides were a bit worrisome the first couple of inserts. You have to wiggle the drive a bit to get it fully seated. I suppose that's the nature of a tray-less drive enclosure. I'm not confident it will survive a lot of wear and tear.The drives are "on their own" once inserted. There's nothing locking them in place and the last inch of the drive is sticking out of the slot so you can pull the drive out directly, rather than a full insertion with an eject mechanism. Thankfully, the case I'm using (Plink USA 2U Rackbuy) has an external face-plate door that also locks so at least they won't fall out if I move the case. I'm kinda worried about long term vibration or any movement causing them to dislodge. Again - likely the nature of being tray-less.Conclusion:One star off for being somewhat flimsy when inserting drives and for the obnoxiously loud fan.I'm somewhat satisfied and think it's probably worth the money. I would have preferred a tray type enclosure but it is likely nearly impossible to size 3 drives into the space required to fit into a double 5.25 bay with solid trays. It will probably last long enough to have been worth it and other options are slim pickings.It's rare that a manufacturer includes a decent (i.e. quiet and efficient) fan, so why do they bother? I'd rather have $5 lower price and buy my own fan because theirs is going into the trash.