Pros: Port multiplier, so less cabling; great for set-ups where you have a lot of storage but no locality of access. Compact unit, much nicer than the SCSI 5.25" chassis I've been converting for FireWire or eSATA port multiplier.

Cons: Stupid blue LED rear fan. It has a front door like a hotswap chassis, but the drives screw in with thumbscrews and you need to take the cover off to change them. None of that is why I took an egg away, though. The bundled RR622 card is garbage. Well, maybe it isn't, but HighPoint doesn't have true open source drivers for Linux, they use binary blobs. And they don't work under high write load; the NCQ gets corrupt and entire drives get kicked off the whole bus.

Overall Review: The unit works very well with the AHCI SATA controller on my motherboard (ASUS M4A77TD PRO). It's really just the bundled card that let me down; I'm actually using the bundled card with a different port multiplier enclosure, and some quick searching on my symptoms shows that I'm not the only one with problems with the High Point proprietary drivers. (Which they call "Open Source", despite including pre-compiled .o files.) Never buy hardware that needs software from a hardware company....

Pros: Stereo sound is quite good; treat this as a music set only.

Cons: Microphone is terrible; people can barely hear me with this set. Haven't figured out how to get the thing to sit comfortably on my ears.

Overall Review: I got this one because one from a Different Brand got damaged by moisture and I couldn't find one in stock, so I tried this. It wasn't worth it.

Pros: Works; fairly easy to assemble; nice and light (before you bolt drives to it).

Cons: There is a two-layer permanent filter attached to this unit, between the front grille and the fan. It cannot be serviced with the unit mounted in a system: you have to remove the assembly. (You can remove the grille without having to unbolt the drives, at least). After a few months, this filter clogged so badly it completely blocked airflow, and triggered a smartmond temperature alarm. I removed the filter mesh layers and reassembled it; dropping drive temperature by 8 degC. A filter you have to dismantle the system to clean is not useful, so it's not going back in.

Overall Review: As the only electrical part of this is the fan, it's a much safer buy than some of the hot-swap cages, which I've found to be quite hit-or-miss. (Even with the fan filter issue.)

Pros: Plenty of drive connectors; I've got a 6 SATA plugs going. Works fine with my old A7V8X-X mobo, with 5 PCI cards and maxed-out RAM. Lovely and quiet, and the wrapped cables make routing easy and tidy. Generous length is just perfect for my Antec P180-B tower case. Just enough plugs left to hook up a 4-in-3 disk backplane in the future.

Cons: I'd rather have the SATA plugs in groups of 2 or 4, since I do everything in mirrored pairs. My case has a block of 4 HDDs, and a second one with 2 HDDs, and the SATA power plug is only barely long enough to reach from one to the other to hook up all 6 HDDs.

Overall Review: I'm keeping my Linux server running long past its upgrade-by date; it boots from Compact Flash so the BIOS doesn't have to work with my SATA cards. It doesn't need to be fast, just available and a lot of capacity. I like the longer cables even though PSU is only 400W; a single HDD is less than 10 watts today, so if all you've got is disks and a minimalist CPU and video set-up for a bulk/archival file server, this is plenty--and you will want the longer cables.

Pros: It works; I've got an older BIOS and a low-end SATA card that doesn't support boot. So putting /boot on an old 256MB CF card solves that problem without taking up the space and power of running an old IDE drive. (And it gives a 256MB regular-speed card I bought but never really used ('cause I got Ultra II cards shortly after) something to do.)

Cons: As others have pointed out, the LEDs are not visible outside the enclosure, and UDMA mode does not appear to be supported. Also, I find the CF slot is very close to the edge of the slot cut-out on my case; since it doesn't have to line up with a PCI slot, I figure they could have just centred it.

Overall Review: Fedora 10 seems to think my SATA card will have (hd0) and (hd1) on it, which resulted in a boot hang. Of course, I first blamed the CF card, then the adapter... when I was patching to boot configuration into a scrap IDE hard disk, I realized the problem was grub had been told the drive was (hd2) and not (hd0). So, anyone looking to use this so they can have Fancy New Drives on an older BIOS, or Fancy New Partitioning Tables, or are just tired of a non-LVM chunk taken out of at least one disk... double-check grub really has been configured to use (hd0) (typically on-board primary/master IDE).