Pros: Very fast and reliable.

Cons: None to speak of.

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: - Spacious, yet small - Fairly modular - A good number of fixed drive bays

Cons: - Inconsistent build quality control - Customer service has been pretty terrible when there IS a problem

Overall Review: I've built a fairly large number of PCs using this for a case (any time where a rackmount system was involved that couldn't be further confined down to a lower number of U). As I said above in the "pros" section, I use it because it's fairly easily adaptable to pretty much anything I've been able to throw at it--longer (or taller) expansion cards, liquid cooling vs traditional, large number of fixed drive bays, etc. It's a workhorse. That being said, and as others have mentioned above, it's a crapshoot as far as to the state of the case when you receive it. I've seen some with really bad paint touch-ups, some where the front latch has to be manually adjusted or fixed, and recently, one where the 5.25" bay was stuck in place (the screws spin in place, and it looks like there's glue residue around them). Contacting their customer service has been an exercise in futility. Newegg requires a case ID number for them to replace the case, but ARK hasn't yet given me one (although requested), and through an email chain that goes back almost two months. It's frustrating. I'd love to be able to give this a much better star rating, but I agree with the other reviewers--the build quality has really, really fallen off over the last couple of years.