Question 1

I bought one of these yesterday. I should have read it backwards and upside down first. The way I understood the description and the way it reads hopefully the way it is that there are  2-5 25" drive bays as well as 3-3.5 hot swap hdd . Now after further investigation, it appears to be 2 of the 5.25 drive bays OR 3 hot swap 3.5 bays. Ok... Not what I was looking for but I could still use it IF I CAN RUN 1-525 and 2-3.5  but the advertisement can't give me this info without disclosing that it  ISNT 5 bays.

My question is, what configurations can I use with this rack?

Accepted Answer

Sorry, you read it wrong.  What this does it allows 3x3.5" drives to fit into an external 2x5.25" bay.  People use these to add additional HDD space to a PC by sacrificing some of their 5.25" bays.

To answer your other question, no, this only gives you 3x3.5" drives and uses 2.5.25" bays to do this.  So if your system has 3x5.25" bays, then this would take up 2 of them and that gives you one left over to use.  But if your system only has two 5.25" bays, then you loose them.

For example, I own a Define R4 case that I use to house my home server.  I needed more room for additional 3.5" HDD's, so I bought one of these.  Since my Define R4 only has two 5.25" bays to begin with, when I installed this, I gained three more 3.5" slots, but lost both 5.25" bays so I can no longer mount a CD/DVD drive.

Question 2

The product says it has multi-functional LED indicators. I'm trying to find a product that will visually indicate with the LED lights when the HDD is bad. Is this a function on this product?

Accepted Answer

No, these can be thought of as "dumb" drive bays, they provide power and a SATA pass through to the drive. If you want LEDs to indicate drive health, that will require some smarts in the controller or software, you'll be looking for drobo, synology, perhaps qnap or some enterprise-grade rack/controller

Question 3

What types of hard drives are compatible with the iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS-RED?

Accepted Answer

The iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS-RED is compatible with 3.5" SAS I/II and SATA I/II/III hard drives.

Question 4

What is the maximum data transfer rate supported by the iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS-RED?

Accepted Answer

The maximum data transfer rate supported by the iStarUSA BPN-DE230SS-RED is up to 6.0 Gb/s.

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