Question 1

Does the key turn on and off each individual bay separetely?

Accepted Answer

My recollection is that the keys are only a security measure - i.e. to provide you a little assurance that you are pulling the drive you meant to.  I do not think the power is associated with the key - but I am old and have slept since I build my array.

Question 2

If the fan goes out, can I replace it with a standard 80mm fan or is this a proprietary fan size? Also, If I buy 2 of the 4 drive cages, will the keys be identical?

Accepted Answer

Yes you can replace the fan however the plug is different. I have 3 of these the oldest being 4 years that I changed the fan on. I just cut the plug off the old fan and soldered it to the new fan. Yes the keys are the same on all of mine.

Question 3

Can this be booted from ? I am looking for an easy acess to be able to change operating systems on one computer without using the boot manager or opening the case and switching cables .

Accepted Answer

This case connects hard drives to your motherboard exactly the same as connecting them directly. It is simply a tray to hold the physical drive itself and make it easier to remove. The connection shows up in your BIOS just like a normal drive connection. So you could use the BIOS to switch which drive to boot from, or just unplug the 3 drives you don't want to boot from if your OS supports hot swapping them on the fly.

Question 4

can I take a Seagate ES.3 SAS drive (SFF8482) and plug directly into this cage? then connect backend to SAS controller.

Accepted Answer

Hi Alan,

This cage should work just fine for you.  It supports SAS I/II and SATA I/II/III drives.

The backplane on the unit utilizes 1 SATA port for each drive.  So to connect this to your controller card, you'll either need to use 1 cable for each drive, or a multi-lane breakout cable (depending on the controller card you plan to use).

I really like mine...just don't lose the key as it uses a special key to lock  the bays into the cage.  The only thing I really didn't care for was the color of the LED's.  My LED's are a pinkish purple color...not very manly.  If you plan on using several of these cages, you'll have to decide if you want to see pink blinking lights when you walk into the server room.  Obviously this has nothing to do with functionality.

Questions & Answers