Pros: Works. Seems to be robust. Power and activity lights work. Might be fine in a server room -- but then a proper server hot-swap bay would be a better choice.

Cons: Very, very tight fit. Had to push *very hard* to get it into a 5.25 bay. Molex power connector is annoying in a stack of drives, but I knew that going in. 40mm server fan is now the loudest thing in my build; louder than the combined noise from a PSU fan, a GPU fan, 4x fans on my rad and three case fans. One 40mm fan is louder than NINE 120mm fans! And it runs at full rpm even when there is NO DISK. Naturally there is no way to reduce the rpm. Returning for a Rosewill RX-C525.

Other Thoughts: I put a hot-swap bay into almost all of the machines I build. They make file transfer, OS testing, dual-boot, system replication and many other things easier. After suffering through failures of a variety of low-cost units, I bought this specifically for its apparent robustness. I even made a custom SATA/Molex power cable to run it.

But once it was in and powered up, there is no way I can leave it whining away with a 40mm server fan spinning madly at 12v all the time. I could case-mod the thing to either (a) reduce voltage to the fan, (b) replace the fan with a quieter one, (c) add a thermal control or even an ON/OFF switch.

Or I can RMA it as soon as yet another inexpensive-but-quiet replacement arrives.

Pros: Sturdy case, clean, solid design, and works exactly as intended. Quiet fan. Best tech support I've run into on the consumer side in at least ten years.

Cons: Door latch problem on first unit, but the support experience was so good I'm almost glad it happened. Yeah, seriously.

Other Thoughts: Had a problem with the first unit - drive wasn't recognized. Found out I needed AHCI mode and the reg. hack for Win7 to autodetect AHCI vs. IDE again, and boot in AHCI mode properly. Still no luck, so I filled out the little support form on the page. Later *that night*, maybe 8:30pm, I got a call from ICYDOCK. Support guy I talked to chatted me up like a normal peer, went back and forth over some troubleshooting thoughts - no script-reading, no first-line crud, no poor accents, just a very sharp engineer treating me like a fellow human being solving a problem. At a loss for words how refreshing that is. I'd forgotten that companies even used to do that. Long-story short, RMA and they actually repaired the unit I sent and provided the cause on the receipt! Turns out the door-close lever in back was just subtly bent and was allowing the door to close, but preventing the drive from seating fully. Anyway, I'll be recommending them far and wide...

Pros: Build quality is very good IMO
The flat face allows door panels to be closed on certain cases like mine

Cons: Expensive......
The key lock doesn't actually lock out the hard drive
It just locks it in the case
Big disappointment for me.....
Tight fit in my Coolermaster CM 280 bay

Pros: Convenient trayless, not as flimsy as I thought from other reviews.

Cons: Fan is too noisy. They should have put a switch to turn on/off the fan and allow the drive to be turned off.

Other Thoughts: If run with Vertex 4 SSD, it prevents my PC from sleeping. It's good a improvised an on/off switch so it runs only as needed.

Pros: This is a fairly well-made tray-less SATA product, BUT be careful if you intended on using it with Marvell Controller ports that are on the motherboard (see below).

Cons: This product will absolutely NOT WORK if you are using onboard Marvell SATA 3 ports (i.e., ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe/GEN3 board). When you place any type of SATA hard drive into the tray and close it, it will indeed "find" the drive in Windows 7, BUT once you try to write to that inserted drive, it will stall and go no further. That will happen no matter what drivers you load. So, if you're going to use this product, ONLY attach it to Intel controller ports on the motherboard, and use the onboard Marvel ports for direct connection to other drives.

Other Thoughts: However, If you have an add-in controller card (i.e. PCIe x1 Rosewill SATA 3) these Icy Dock units work just fine. There is something incompatible with the onboard version of the Marvell SATA 3 ports and these units, and Icy Dock ought to correct in ASAP!!

Pros: It does seem to work fine with my ASUS Sabertooth X79 motherboard's SATA II ports, which use the chipset controller. I have a previous Icy Dock bay that this was to replace that is SATA II compatable that does as well though.

Cons: It has issues with both the chipset based SATA III ports and the Marvel controller SATA III ports. Also, although the description says SATA I, SATA II & SATA III and also says SATA 6.0 gb/sec, the box this came in says a max of 300 mb/sec. Otherwise SATA II speeds. Anyway, I'll rate this 3 eggs since as a SATA II bay it works fine, but this is adverted as a SATA III bay.

Other Thoughts: This is far from Newegg's fault, but the train that this was being shipped on to get here locally did derail, and thus my package was delayed a day. I only mention this to note that although the shipping box wasn't damaged and the other item I ordered is working fine, it is possible that the item was damaged in shipping and thus why it's not working. Having said that, I do doubt this given that the box was fine, everything was packed well and the box the docking bay came in was perfectly intact.

And YES, for the record ALL of my ports are set for AHCI, all of my ports are set to hot swap in the BIOS (mine even has a setting to turn on and off individual ports for hot swapping) so I know that isn't the issue.

Pros: If you treat it gently it works nicely.

Cons: In my first unit, the ejector mechanism bent the first time I used it. Too late to RMA thought NewEgg, but IcyDock replaced it quickly.
It would be nice if they used a SATA power connector and eliminated all the circuitry (ex. voltage regulation).

Other Thoughts: It's important to use the door closing motion to push the drive the final inch or so into the dock.

Pros: It works, did not kill my drive. Keeps idle drives cooler than the BYTECC did. Door and extractor works better too.

Cons: Cooling fan does not shut off when no drive is inserted. The fan would last longer if it did.

Other Thoughts: I wish I could still get the Syba model, those worked very well.

Pros: - Good build quality
- Works well after an easy 5 minute modification (see other)

Cons: - The tiny fan is not loud but I would not say quiet either. I wish it was a bit easier to disable this fan rather than needing to disassemble the chassis.

Other Thoughts: First I agree with many who have posted that some drives (actually all that I used for testing) do not fit very well. It's hard to get the drives in and even harder to get them out possibly resulting in scratching the side of the drive.

The reason for this is that on either side of the inside of the bay there is a metal lip that acts as a spring to hold the drive in place. These are too tight for one. Also if you look closely these lips are shaped such that there is an exposed sharp edge pointing inward and angled towards the sides of the drive so that by design it gets caught on the drive as you try to slide it out. I just have to ask why anyone thought to implement this...

Very poor design but fortunately a small issue that is easily fixed. I used a C clamp to flatten these lips just a little bit and now all drives (Samsung F4, WD green, WD RE, and a few old drives I tested) slide in smoothly and are all easily pulled out using the door mechanism.

Pros: Refer to my previous 2 comments.

This device has not missed a beat being used as a backup device. Transfer rate using backup exec is about 1300 to 19oo MB depending on the size and type of fle. Restores are about 4 times faster than the backup speed. If you need an inexpensive backup device this is definately a good buy.

Cons: None