Mediasonic 6 x 2.5” SATA Hard Drive/SSD to 5.25 Drive Bay Mobile Rack Backplane – Hot-Swap/Removable Tray Design/Metal Construction (HT21-106)

I bought this as I decided to fill up my SATA ports with SSDs that were all on sale late November.I received the item quickly, I ended up test fitting a few disks then disassembled the device to remove the LEDs (they're bright. I'm anti-LED though and don't blame the company) - I also disconnected the fan as SSDs shouldn't be cooled unless there's a specific need (the NAND likes to be a certain temperature and the NAND controllers should never overheat on SATA drives or SATA M.2) - The build quality is pretty nice--all metal, easy to disassemble and reassemble. The trays are solid and easy to mount drives into. I'd buy another one if I needed for other PCs.WHY 4 stars: The only problem I had was with aligning the disks to the SATA ports. My SSDs were all 7mm which, without any side support on the trays, required being careful and purposeful when connecting the drives to the SATA ports. I missed a few SATA ports before I noticed. - That said, the trays support thicker disks (such as laptop disk drives) so that's just the name of the game. I have no doubt that any other device with similar trays would suffer similar issues.All-in-all, solid all-metal construction with lots of fasteners, competitive price. I recommend it.

I installed six known good hard drives and connected this to my NAS. The drives in the bottom two bays were not recognized by the OS. I swapped the middle hard drives with the bottom hard drives and now four drives were not recognized. I removed each drive and tested it with a USB to SATA adapter on another computer and now 4/6 of my hard drives (the ones initially in the bottom bays and the ones from the middle bay I tried in the bottom bays) are DEAD. I have been a computer tech for 7+ years, and have three servers in my home with multiple hard drives each, so no, I didn't use this product incorrectly. I'm going to contact Amazon and see if they will provide me a refund and take this junk back, and reimburse me for my damaged hard drives. My data is gone too, although I have a backup, so that's not a big deal, just an inconvenience. I do wish this thing had worked because it's got good quality metal construction and the fan is quiet. Not that it matters now because it's DOA and killed my hard drives. I would give negative stars if I could - it doesn't even deserve the one star I gave it.

I purchased 2 of these due to the only other review. He is correct as they can be tedious to line up and get the drives to click in. I also returned one for a replacement as when I clicked the tab to get the arm to come out, it shot out as it was broke off. that replacement came in and I installed both of these at the same time. When I powered it on, one set of 6 were blue and blinking but then my 2nd set all turned red. I was thinking... I don't recall Red LED in the description...THEN I SMELLED THE BAD SMOKE SMELL!!!!Well I lost 3 SSD drives. Up in smoke. Took the units apart, tested all of my drives and yes 3 drives are now bad. Hopefully I can get them swapped under warranty but if not, im out a lot of $ as I cheaped out on these.I was going to go with icy dock but they are $12 more each.... well These are boxed up and I will spend the extra $.im not saying don't buy them, just caution...the good was all the screws, 6 sata cables, cage and hot swap ability... was surprised at all of that for $45...

Seeing this product on Amazon led to improvements in my home Linux system. This turned into a bigger project than I wanted because my home Dell XPS 8300 wasn't built for this. Problems to overcome:(1) both 5.25 inch bays don't have normal front plates, but flip down panels that CDROM/DVD trays pass through. Turns out it's only inconvenient to access the top four bays, and it blocks in the bottom two. Given I wanted a home mirror I was find with those in the bottom two slots locked in by the hing mechanism of the XPS 8300's funky face plate.(2) The XPS 8300 doesn't offer the correct power connectors. Fixed with a SATA power adapter.(3) Only 4 SATA connectors on an XPS 8300 motherboard. I probably should have bought a new SATA HBA, but decided I would use an old adaptec off of ebay. Mainly because when you have a decent graphics card, the XPS only has PCIe x1 slots. So I removed a sound card (enabled onboard sound) and added my RAID controller and 4 additional SATA ports. Again probably should have gone with a modern HBA because the RAID controller is very slow to load it's firmware.(4) I only had 3.5 in drives. Given I planned to use ZFS mirrors I bid on a few ebay drive lots. Eventually winning a lot of 4 WD 500GB drives and a pair of Intel SSD 500GB drives.After collecting all the necessary hardware it went together smoothly and I was able to test a number of configurations. A ZFS mirror of SSD drives is very fast. But ZFS mirrored WD drives proved to function quite well too. I have a lot of choices, and backups with this configuration. It seems quieter than my older 3.5 inch 1TB drives, and I had expected four 7200rpm WD HDD hanging out the front to be louder than a single 5400rpm Seagate 1TB drive inside the case. Obviously the SSDs are silent.This worked so well I'm now itching to build a new system from scratch so I could have all hot swapable drives and no RAID controller. The old RAID controller probably makes my system the slowest booting SSD based box ever. But it's Linux, so I only boot a few times a year.

What can I say? It was exactly what I needed and it works. The only thing that could make this better is if it didn't require screws to affix the drives to the trays. It can be a bit annoying if you swap drives often. But I knew this before I purchased it, so there's no reason to deduct any stars. I have a few Mediasonic products and they all work great so I would certainly recommend their products to anyone.

The design is solid with the majority of the frame made of metal. The drive slots could have a bit better alignment but it is not unusable by any means. If you are going to use mechanical drives, I would look for something with better cooling, but this is a great hot-swap 6-bay enclosure for SSD drives.

Works great. No drivers or software to install. Easy installation

I have had this in one of my servers for about a year now. So far there have been no issues with this unit. For the cost I am happy with it.

drive bays can be a little janky. wiggle em.

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