ICY DOCK Rugged 4 x 2.5 SAS/SATA HDD/SSD Mobile Rack Enclosure for 5.25" Bay | ToughArmor MB994SP-4S

Been running this ToughArmor for about 8 months now in my Lenovo P520 and it's been rock solid. Was initially torn between this and some cheaper alternatives, but the full metal construction and MiniSAS HD connectors sold me - glad I spent the extra money. Installation was pretty painless once I figured out the cable routing. Fits perfectly in two 5.25" bays, though you'll want to make sure your case has enough depth. The included SAS cables are good quality and the connectors feel solid. My only minor gripe is that the mounting screws could be a bit longer - had to be careful not to cross-thread them. Hot-swap functionality works exactly as advertised. I've pulled drives while the system was running multiple times with no issues. The individual drive status LEDs are bright enough to see clearly, and the activity indicators actually help when troubleshooting. Build quality is genuinely impressive - this thing feels like it could survive a small earthquake. Running a mix of Samsung 870 EVOs and some older Intel enterprise SSDs with no compatibility issues. Temps stay reasonable even under heavy load, though I do have decent case airflow. The drive trays slide smoothly and lock securely - no wobbling or loose connections. Only real downside is the price, but you get what you pay for. This isn't for casual users - if you're just looking to add a couple drives to your gaming PC, there are cheaper options. But if you're building a proper server or NAS and need reliable hot-swap capability, this is worth every penny. Would definitely buy again for future builds. ICY DOCK clearly knows what they're doing with enterprise-grade storage solutions.

Works like a charm. Solid metal design, good airflow above and below for each slot, and a single power connector for all four (separate SATA data cables, one sata-power cable). Being me, I took the thing apart. Five screws and the backplane comes off, one more and its circuit board can be taken out and examined. Totally trivial, very well seated and secured... notches into the frame... zero wiggle room (good!). I counted 9 capacitors on the power distribution bus so they didn't cut any corners there. Inserting an HDD did not glitch the power for the other drives that were already in. I give the backplane a big thumbs up for design and engineering. The drive bays are solid. Considering that we are cramming four 2.5" drives into a 5.25" enclosure, the design is very good. The bottom of each bay drops out a little to give the bottom of the drive a little space. The areas near the screw holes are flush, though, but it didn't seem to have any issues mounting the seagate HDDs I had without a plastic protector (clearance on the HDD drive mounts is about 1mm to the drive's circuit board). It is not screwless... requires four screws (flatheads are included). Two are round holes, two are oval. Not sure why they didn't use round for all four but the two round holes are near the connector side so the drive's connector is guaranteed to be properly aligned. Easycakes, and honestly you only need to use two screws (in the round holes nearest the connector) anyway. The fan is the only downside, being small and noisy, but I still give the device 5 stars for several reasons. First, they included a fan control switch (OFF, LOW, HIGH settings). Second, airflow looks good for all four slots. In terms of the fan control, no point ever using 'HIGH'. Just use LOW or OFF. The LOW setting is definitely audible which is unfortunate but there isn't a whole lot of room on the design side considering the fan has to fit the height. On the plus side, not only is there an 'OFF' position (if you have SSDs, you don't need the fan), but if the case itself has good airflow you can physically remove the fan with two simple screws to open it up and allow the case airflow to handle any cooling requirements. The fan's power able goes to a connector and just pulls off, so its easy to remove. In fact, if you really wanted to and didn't want the hot-swap, you could unscrew the whole backplane and just use it as four permanent slots. Silly I know, but the case is so well engineered that it has that flexibility if you wanted it. Fan tests, Four 1TB Seagate HDDs. Writing mean all four drives writing continuously for 20 minutes or so. Temperatures taken using SMART info (all four returned the same temp within +/- 1C): idle, low fan: 26C Idle, no fan: 27C (i.e. PC case fan only, no direct airflow) writing, high fan: 38C writing, low fan: 41C writing, no fan: 47C (i.e. PC case fan only, no direct airflow) So with all those features and easy modding, ICY gets 5 stars. ADDENDUM - I had one issue with the dock. On one of the machines I used longer screws to mount the dock in the bay. They turned out to be too long and infringed on the tray area, causing damage to one of the trays which I didn't realize until I tried to pull the tray out and couldn't. This was my own fault. So remember to use the low-profile screws that come with the unit... or at least make sure they don't infringe the bays. ADDENDUM2 - If you purchase your own 40mm fan you may not be able to use the LOW setting. Depending on the fan, it might not startup unless you use the HIGH setting. I still definitely recommend purchasing your own low-noise 40mm fan and not using the cheap noisy one that comes with the unit. You don't need much airflow to cool HDDs (and don't need any at all for SSDs), so find the quietest 40mm fan you can and you will be a happy camper. The only downside to the unit is having to screw the drives into the hot-swap trays... in particular, losing the screws for the trays you aren't using atm. I recommend storing the unused screws in their plastic bag IN one of the unused trays. -Matt

I'm using the Icy Dock MB516SP-B in a Fedora 32 (Linux) virtualization server. Overall, I am happy with it. It is solidly constructed and performs well. Installation required a case mod. The MB516SP-B fits in two 5.25 inch external drive bays. On the case that I used (Corsair Carbide Series Air 540), I had to flatten the metal tab between the 5.25 drive bays. The MB516SP-B does have a groove which might accomodate a lower profile tab, but alas, my chosen case had tabs which stuck out too much. Too be fair I've had to make similar case mods for other cases in which I've installed Supermicro mobile racks (5 drive HDD bays). I flatten these tabs by first bending them part way with an adjustable locking plier (vice grips). I then use a BIG C-clamp to flatten the tabs. It's maybe a fifteen to twenty minute job with the right tools. I'm using Samsung and Western Digital SSDs with the MB516SP-B. It's fully populated, i.e. I have 16 SSDs in it. All bays work and the SSDs mounted easily to the drive trays. One small problem is that two of the drive activity lights are kind of dim. The LEDs on the backplane appear to be bright enough; it might just be that mechanism which conducts the light to the front of the tray is not very effective on a couple of the trays. I considered deducting a star for this problem, but IMO is really only a half star deduction. You will mostly likely need a host bus adapter or RAID controller with this SSD backplane. I'm using a Broadcom HBA 9400-16i which also works well. I had problems with the set of (Cable Plus branded) SFF-8643 cables that I purchased; they simply did not work. I then purchased a set of 10Gtek branded cables which worked fine.

Used for a desktop storage array where low volume high IOPS (all inexpensive SSDs) were needed. Case arrived slightly damaged (bent frame prevented a caddy from ejecting, easily bent back). Bought this for the high density in a single 5.25" bay. The power connectors wont mate well with a daisy chained power cable; use a splitter instead. Suggest having a cable management strategy before buying, including measuring the necessary SATA cable lengths. Have not yet fully tested all drive bays, but no issues with 4/8 populated. Also, note that some 2.5" SSDs (and maybe HDDs) are thicker than others. This will not fit thicker drives. It works fine with the Samsung and Crucial SSDs I had. The drive caddys are OK, but their insertion is sloppy. There is little in the way of guidance without the adjacent bays being populated; be careful and gentle when inserting even empty caddys. The price I originally paid ($136) is excessive, but alternatives are limited. I like the all metal construction, but if the price were lower I'd have bought another. The fans were garbage and I eventually replaced them with two noctua brand fans that were quieter and of higher quality. For $250 this is an absolute rip off if you're using SSDs. I would sooner let my SSDs dangle in the case and have to crack it open to replace them once in the next 3-5 years than pay for this overpriced product. Used without issue with a cheap LSI 9260-8i. I recommend buying more modern card if you can afford it to better take advantage of the increased connectivity this bay offers.

I was pleasantly surprised with this product. It often seems any type of conversion bay from any vendor at any price point has poor reviews or downsides to it. This turned out to be great. I had very few issues to raise with mine and even those ones weren't a big deal. I used mine to house 4 SSDs for my rig. Seeing as my case didn't have native 2.5" bays/trays it was nice to separate all my 2.5" SSDs somewhere they fit. It is fully SATA3 (6.0Gbps) compliant. When putting it all together it felt like everything wasn't going to line up, but once I was done it did. It looked great and fit in just fine. Pros: -Nice sleek look. Metal front panels look nice and are durable. Other brands use plastic and/or look cheap and use flashy "gamer" colors. -Activity/power LEDs for each drive, although my case is usually shut so I don't see them. -Only requires 2 molex ports, others require more. With a molex splitter it was easy to power both off of 1 source. -2 Fans. They move a good bit of air too. They probably weren't even necessary for 2.5" drives but they're a welcome feature. -The molex and SATA ports are spread out nicely, and line up with their corresponding drives. I've seen others where they're tight, lined up sideways, etc., making it difficult to plug everything in and maintain cable management. Plenty of room here. Cons: -Drive trays can be difficult to open and close. My SSDs were a tight fit to slide in and out, and I felt like the SATA pins could've gotten scratched in the process. I have no intention of "hot-swapping" these drives any time soon, if ever, so these aren't an issue going forward. -Could've been a little cheaper, but this price point is the norm for this type of product with these features.

I use these Icy dock bays to achieve storage capacities that exceed what could be achieved with 3.5" drives. Using the 4 bay MB994SP-4S I can fit 4 Seagate 5TB 2.5" drives into a single 5.25" bay. I have a modified super tower with 12 5.25" bays, an Adaptec 72405 RAID controller and a lot of data to store. The densest (as of the time I'm writing this review) for 3.5" drives is 10TB per drive with a 5 in 3 drive chassis, which would allow for 50TB in 3 bays. Where as with these drive chassis, 5TB X 4 per bay allows for 60TB in 3 bays. The 5TB 2.5" drive is 15mm thick and the MB994SP-4S allows for 15mm drives. the 6 bay version only allows for up to 9.5mm and the 8 bay model MB998SP-B allows for up to 7mm, which is perfect my Samsung 850 SSDs. When I am done, I will have 7 MB994SP-4S, 1 MB998SP-B and of course, a port expander for to allow for all the Seagate drives (the Adaptec 72405 only has 24 internal 6Gb/s SAS/SATA ports.) With a 1GB cache and each drive having a maximum internal transfer rate of less 200MB/s, putting the Seagate drives on port expanders for double the drives per channel will not impede the performance. 8 ports reserved for the SSDs and 16 ports attached to the port expanders, I will have the storage capacity I need without compromising performance. For that matter, I could use the Intel SATA controller on the motherboard for my least critical array and avoid the need for the port expanders. I haven't decided yet. LOL. Now, why Icy dock and not any of the other brands out there? Because the Icy dock drive bays are the highest quality and most reliable. Also, if I ever lose or accidentally damage a tray, I can buy just a replacement tray. These are perfect for hot swappable drives in a RAID environment.

Pro: Seems well constructed out of metal. Pro: Up to 4 drives which can each be up to 15 mm thick. Pro: While the list price is definitely high, they can be had for a much more reasonable price online (I got mine here on Amazon for around $85). Con: Dual 40mm fans are too loud for a desktop system in this day and age of "silence is golden" computing. Replacement/extra locking drive bay adapters are now listed on the Icy Dock site and are available from one online dealer so far, so I have removed that previously listed con point. I'm not adding a star though, because the fan noise is such an important issue (to me). The fans are not variable speed, and there is no "hi-lo-off" switch like there is on one of Icy Dock's other models. What would be really nice is a 4-pin (or even just 3-pin, non-PWM) connector so that the fans could be controlled by the PC motherboard such as Asus QFan. I will probably modify my unit to do exactly that using a Noctua fan and perhaps a thermistor. There are a number of ways the Icy Dock engineers could have solved the fan noise issue, other than sticking 2 40 mm fans in the case and running them at full speed all of the time. Perhaps a future revision of the product will address the fan noise issue. I have not had this unit for very long so I can't comment on well the hot-plugging and such work. Update 7/6/2015: I've been using this product for awhile now and, except for the fan noise (I disconnected the twin 40 mm fans), I like it very much. If you can forgo the fans, unplug them and then this product CAN be used for a silent PC. My drives, SSD and mechanical, operate between 30 C and 40 C (mostly on the low end of that range) without the fans plugged-in in 27 C ambient conditions. The hot plugging works fine. Replacement/extra locking drive bay adapters are now listed here on Amazon by a number of merchants and also elsewhere online (though most of the non-Amazon avenues list the part as out of stock) and are quite pricey at approximately $25/each with shipping.

I had quite a few 2.5" HDDs as a result of upgrading old laptops to SSD and I was looking for an enclosure which could house them into my gaming PC. I didn't really care about RAID functionality as it is mostly software managed now. This product was perfect for my requirement. The metal enclosure is necessary as my HDDs were all 7200 RPM and the metal body really helps in heat dissipation. The fan that came with the enclosure was not that great when it comes to airflow and noise so I replaced it with a Noctua 5V PWM fan which I control via motherboard instead of the enclosure. Please note that with all the 6 HDDs present and if they are 7200 RPM, you really need a fan as heat dissipation through the case is not sufficient. With the fan running at low to medium speed, I was able to limit the HDD temperature below 35C. The build quality is pretty good and I would rather pay more to get a good product than buy something cheap and end up ruining my HDDs. In my opinion, this product is cost-effective and I would definitely recommend it.