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Well, I finally upgraded my old AMD Sempron 145 Unraid server after 11 years of service. My "plan" was to re-use my trusty Norco SS-400 drive bays, despite purchasing them in a different era and featuring a maximum specification of SATAII speeds. Upon upgrading my SAS HBA to 6gbps SATAIII speeds, that "plan" fell apart. I started seeing errors on a few of the drives. After a couple of disabled drive events due to write errors, I knew I had to replace the drive bays.
Unfortunately, it seems like the drive bay market doesn't have any "clear" winners these days. After a lengthy search, these Kingwin's appeared to be about as "premium" as one can get these days. I pulled the trigger on three of these Kingpin's to fully replace my finely aged Norco's. I planned to replace the fan immediately as I know these units always come with loud, obnoxious and typically poorly performing fans.
I read over the specs and I knew these units came with an odd sized 80x80x15mm fan. I thought, "How dumb would you have to be to not support the most common fan in the world, 80x80x25mm? Well, I'll kill the suspense. These are THAT dumb. You can make it work, but definitely not well. To get my Noctua NF-A8 FLX 3 PIN fans sufficiently secured, I could not install the drive bay's fan protector over the fan with the supplied screws. A longer screw by just 1mm would have done it. So, now my fans are just sitting out there, waiting to eat a SAS cable one of these days. The whole fan mount is odd, too, I can easily think of very minor design tweaks that would have greatly improved the fan installation. Had I known the fans would be exposed, I definitely would have selected one of Noctua's "prettier" fans.
But wait, it gets worse. The drive bay's fan connector of course doesn't use the industry standard 3-pin Dupont style connector like you'd see in every 3rd party case fan sold today. No, it uses the micro-style Dupont connector, the likes you would see on enterprise network or server hardware and ultra compact equipment. The 3-pin Dupont connector has been around in PC's since the 1980's, at least! Maybe there are adapters, who knows? Frankly, there's only so much I'm willing to put into a poor design choices to "make it right." I just brought the fan connectors back to my motherboard through some PWM fan splitters. It's a hack job, but it works I guess.
I just find it hard to believe such a disregard for common standards can still be a thing in 2022. I expected this kind of thing ten years ago, not these days. Even my decade plus old drive bays were built properly, so there's just no excuse.
Enough of the complaints. The drive bays are actually quite nice. They are made from metal and are attractive for the most part. I went from a tray design to trayless, which I was a bit hesitant about. Turns out, trayless is pretty sweet. I had no problems with fitting the 4-in-3 into my case, it slid right into the rails. I also liked that these new bays shaved off probably 2 inches of depth compared to my Norco bays, which gave my motherboard's rear facing SATA ports a bit more berth. If you don't like the rather bright LED's on the individual bays, a switch can be set to turn them off. I don't mind them (for now, subject to change) and I really like that they indicate drive usage - a missing feature on my Norco's.
I had no technical troubles to speak of, which is decidedly a win. (Though I did have to mod my case with a Dremel to fit three drive bays on my original build 11 years ago.) All 12 drive bays were immediately responsive, negotiating at 6gbps SATAIII. I run a mix of 16TB and 8TB Seagate hard drives at this time, though I'd be surprised to see a drive bay be incompatible with drive sizes. It's really more about cooling ability and the means of staying within drive specifications. Possibly a silver lining to the fan issues described above, the motherboard's PWM control of the fans does make for a slightly quieter operation most of the time.
Probably most important, cooling capability. One of the very first things I did was run a parity check, which rips all 12 drives at full speed for around 16 hours. It's a serious stress test and will push drive bays to their limit. My Norco cases would peak at 115F with ambient air in the mid-to-high 60's, hot but still within my drive specifications. The Kingwin's perform pretty much identically, probably on account of using the same fan. This offers me a bit of breathing room for higher ambient temperatures, since my drive's peak operating temperature is 149F. I'd be concerned if I ever saw indoor ambient air temperatures above 100F, though.
So, what's the final verdict? Assuming no troubles come my way, and I'll update if I do have them - I do recommend these Kingwin 4-in-3 drive bays. They're probably about as good as it'll get at this time. I'm frustrated by the fan issues, but I won't see it because my server isn't some RGB freak show in a glass case. If I were doing a higher end build, I'd probably spend the effort to find the right screws. I'd also terminate my own Dupont fan adapter, but I'm way too unmotivated to do it for a utilitarian server build. I'm hoping this will be a good storage foundation for another 10+ years.
| Hard Drive | 2 TB Mechanical Hard Disk |
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