Customer Reviews

5.25in Trayless Mobile Rack for 3.5in HD

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Length:: 1:37 Mins

I can't add anything beyond the title. It's a tray-less hard drive drawer for sata drives. I put it in and it works. I'll probably order 2 more for my data drives.

Having used the Startech SATA tray-based removable drives and the Startech IDE tray based systems in past years, I've found their products to be well designed and reliable. When I saw that I would not be shelling out $20 or so per tray for this new system, I jumped at the chance to get one.

Well, live and learn. To their credit, the unit intalls well and seems well made. So far, it does exactly what it should, allowing for easy insertion and removal of drives without the need for trays.

The Flaw, and it's significant, is that there is no hard drive activity light to let you know it's working and that the drive can be accessed. This is despite the fact that it's advertised to have this feature.

To add to it, when you go to Startech's tech support site, the pages consistently lock up. Their technical bumbling does not end there- when I contacted tech support via their personnel department (yes, that's how I got through), they did not even know the unit had an LED light on it. Heck, it even has a wire hanging off of it with an old-school female 2 prong on it to put on old school motherboards! Neither the manual nor tech support has any clue about its existence, yet there the wire is dangling for the world to see and puzzle over.

Sooo, in a nutshell, there are other trayless bay manufacturers- you may want to take a look and see if they might serve your needs better.

This little tray does exactly what I need: an option to insert/remove my SATA backup drive whenever I needed. Granted, if you don't have hot swap support, you will need to turn off the computer first.

Pros:
- Nicely build for the price
- Sliding mechanism is easy to use
- The drive is lockable
- Easy install. You don't really need a manual in order to install this. Installs like a regular CD-ROM with 4 screws.

Cons:
- There is no activity light. Useless wire plug is provided for the motherboard's activity light.

All in all great HD tray for the price.

Got a bunch of these for me and my friends. We are pack rats and are always running out of storage spaces. This solves all the problem. Fill up one drive. take it out and put it away and install a new one. The only potential problem is if your case uses a rail mounting system for the 5 1/4" bay. The rubber shock mount linking the inner drive bay to the outer mounting plates is a bit soft and the mounting rail may not snap into place. Easy solution is to put a piece of firm foam in between the inner drive bay and the outer mounting plate.

I bought 3 and on one the door will not close without a lot of force. The other 2 have problems that the disk and tray connectors do not always align. Some disks work better than others. When it does not align it is difficult to tell that it happened except that the disk is not recognized. I will return the 1 with the door problem. The other 2 are in a client's working equipment that I will not be able to change out to another type until about 2 months. I will probably not be able to return these.

I am replacing all of them with Vantec EZ Swap 4 3.5-Inch Aluminum Removable Trayless SATA Hard Drive Rack with LCD and Fan MRK-401ST-BK (Black) which are far better quality. I bought 3 of the Vantecs to try out and now have another 3 on backorder.

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.

These are great. if you have hot swap drives they quick change and keep on computing. no more tearing you computer apart to replace the hd. Also this makes for quick OS changes, and drive scans. These are sata only and the drives dont have to be hot swap, simply shut down load then reboot, done. enjoy as i do.

bought this as part of my PC backup strategy: I have two identical backup hard drives, one in the machine and one offsite which I swap periodically. It works great; and now that I have the ability to attach a hard drive so quickly I've found several occasions where I've used the tray for other tasks, like testing a drive from another machine, or installing Linux just for kicks, without having to mess with my primary hard drives.

I take away one star because I couldn't get this unit to work in a vertical orientation; the SATA connectors at the back of the bay wouldn't line up properly with the hard drive. Switching it to the horizontal position immediately lined everything up, allowing the drive to engage and disengage smoothly. So it appears the manufacturing tolerances are a bit loose. I don't know whether this is just a problem with my sample of this drive, or a more general issue with the design of the tray. For me it's no biggie because this unit will generally be in the horizontal position, but it does bug me that there is the potential for damage to the drive or the bay or both if at some point in the future someone tries to use this in the vertical position and pushes too hard to try to force the drive into the bay when the SATA connections are misaligned.

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.

This is a great time saver, much simpler than the IDE removable drive bays I still use because I haven't found a similar product for such drives.

You simply pull out on the little tab to unlock the mechanism handle, then continue pulling it to lever the drive out of it's socket. You can lock it in place if you want to, but you don't have to, to make it work as you do with the IDE trays.