ICY DOCK MB453IPF-B 3 in 2 3.5' SATA I & II Hot-Swap Internal Backplane Raid Cage Module

Pros: Hot swap three drives in two 5 1/4 bays. When it works, it works well.

Cons: I've installed and supported about twenty of these things. The older cages seem to work well and were robust enough that I deployed them for RAID 5 arrays for a commercial hardware product. Physical space was at a premium, and the ease of swapping out failed drives meant less downtime for our customers.

Then, about a year ago, cages started failing left and right. Not complete failure, but enough where the associated arrays would go into panic mode and the array would have to be rebuilt. (This would happen multiple times on a single channel.) Upon troubleshooting, I found that one or two bays would begin acting flaky, causing intermittent dropouts. The controller would check out alright, and moving the individual drives to static placement (circumventing the Icy Dock) would immediately resolve the problem.

Contacting Icy Dock for support was a chore. Since most of these cages were over a year old, I didn't have supporting documentation. Even though I could point out that I had LOTS of failed cages with exactly the same symptoms, no one helped replace them. Needless to say, I now have a pile of these things gathering dust. Useless.

Pros: Running for over 2 years 24x7. I just now took it apart to clean the fan and blow some dust out of it.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Great product

Pros: First off the prime thing that really stands out is a simple, but non-existant one in most simiular Cages / Racks, and that is the 3-5 air holes in each of the drive bay handles - that run the entire length of the span across the front of the drive (looking at the front of the cage) - this provides excellent air intake - and all across the drive space, not a little crack left at the very bottom or top of the bay - which is the normal implementation in almost all these devices. And the air ports are large too - very nice!!

Cons: N/A

Other Thoughts: Now, to the person who mentioned that this wasn't "...Real SAS..." - it is actually, the inside connection to the HDD itself is in fact just what you say is the 'True SAS type - it worrks on both types of drives - just the SAS is a solid bar (yes, containing both data and poer) - and on the back are ports for either a sata or a SAS connection - that should say something right there, in fact, many other cages just have a simple sata connection terminal...And if you are going to utilize - say a SFF-8087 (internal SAS multilane connector) on a Host SAS card, then you would want to use a SFF-8087 to 4 sata (in this case, you would use three for this cage) fanout cable, which would give you the connectors (sata form) to attach to the target (cage) port / terminals. There you would have cabling that is SAS compatable, and the cage does provide yellow - seperate ports for SAS hdd use, and thus you have true SAS compatable setup - there is no necessity for any 'sync' w/ power and data here..

Pros: Well constructed, 4 screws to mount a drive on rails--not a big deal, lock securely in place, good value for the money; drives well ventilated. Have upgraded drives and the ONLY thing that has been easy has been the enclosure. (Motherboard chipsets and recognition of > 1TB drives is a much bigger problem.)

Cons: Odd assortment of SATA connectors: 1 SATA+Power, 2 SATA, 2 standard 5-pin power connectors, just be prepared.

Other Thoughts: Fan protrudes a good ways out of the back, be mindful if using in tight quarters (mine is in a media case with a mATX motherboard)

Pros: Bright LED's. Removable fan. Mostly metal tray. Sturdy construction. Air flow is good considering the fan was removed to clear an Areca RAID card. Temps in RAID config confirm my drives are not baking.

Cons: Unreasonably tight fit into case but I would buy more.

Other Thoughts: Uses a tray, would prefer a trayless version of this unit.

Pros: easy to install and access.

Cons: none

Pros: Excellent construction, built well, easy to understand, simple to use. Not sure how it could be any easier.

FAN: at least in my machine it's so quiet I can't hear it. I was concerned about this. But it's a standard 80mm fan that can be clipped out and replaced easily

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: The only negative thing I can find is possibly that it's such a tight fit to get into the case. But in reality, I want it to be that way. I don't want it to be sloppy and just slide in. Keep in mind, most cases today are screwless. So you rely on tight fits. My Thermaltake case has clips that hook it in, but still, I don't use screws.

Also, people complaining about the instructions? Are you serious? the only reason anyone would have trouble here is if you are a really novice user. there are no instructins needed for SATA. you plug in two molex power connecters, plug in 3 SATA cables in the orange ports, and turn it on. how hard is that? what in the world would people want instructions for? If they're using the SAS i can see it. but even then it's just pin connecters to the fail alarms etc. it's not difficult.

I'm very glad I bought this. it's perfect, and exactly what I expected it to be.

Pros: Never had a problem with ICY Dock Products. Always Great

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I've used one bay, three bay, five bay, and screwless. All have worked fine.

Pros: 3 hard disks in two 5.25 bays, supports SATA and SAS disks, primary and secondary ports for SAs, activity indicator, solid construction, removable fan. Toss in some 2GB drives, and you have some serious storage capacity.

Cons: When they say it occupies two 5.25 bays, they mean it... it is a snug fit, no room to spare. Depending on your case, you may have to wiggle it a bit to get it in. I have two of these, and on one of my cases, it went right in, on the other it was little tight on the sides, but did fit.

Other Thoughts: I feel this product has gotten a bad reputation from previous reviews. I will admit the "User Manual" is light, but I have seen much worse. All you really need to know is documented in the manual: The drive lights are green when powered on, turn amber on disk activity, and turn red on disk fail (if you hook the 6 pin header up to your raid card). Yes there are two "sata" ports per drive on the back, the orange one is for the primary channel, the black one is for the secondary channel (SAS only). Sata disks only support one channel, SAS disks can support 2 data channels. If the unit gets too hot, it sounds an alarm and the temperature light goes on red. The audible alarm can be silence with press of a button. Same story with the fan (assuming you left it attached), if the fan fails, the fan indicator lights red, and the alarm sounds. The only thing that would make this product better was if it had an embedded enclosure management chip to simplify status indicators.

Pros: Easy to install. Easy to swap out drives, and easy to maintain.

Cons: The instructions are a joke. It's a small sheet of paper with instructions written in broken English. The manual doesn't state why there are two different sets of SATA ports but one (black) is for SAS and the other (orange) is for SATA I/II HDs. The jumper block is also confusing and is best to leave it well alone as neither the manual that comes with it tells you which is which, nor does the manual online have anything to say either. Build quality on the cage is not great but works (mine came with a warped frame on the plastics).

Other Thoughts: It's a very nice hot swap backplane module. It does support SAS (which I have yet to test) and it does work at SATA II speeds (three Seagate 7200.10 160GB HDs in RAID 5 via an Adaptec 31205 RAID SAS/SATA II controller card yields about a 325MB/s burst rate and an average read speed of 180MB/s.