iStarUSA BPN-DE350SS-RED 3 x 5.25″ to 5 x 3.5″ SAS/SATA 6.0 Gb/s Trayless Hot-Swap Cage

Pros: I have a server with 8 hard drives. (I bought two of these) I wasn’t going to use this initially. I thought, once you get everything into the case, you really don’t need to touch it, so there’s not much of a need for this. I learned some things along the way that weren’t immediately obvious.
The biggest benefit is that it really helps with cable management. The SATA connectors are all in line. I bought 5 SATA cables with right angle connectors, connecting them from the bottom to top. The cables stack on top of each other, and you can put a zip tie around the cables at the bottom and they’re really cleanly organized. While you can do this with drives (I’ve done it before), removing a drive in the middle can be tough. With the drive bay, you can install the cables before putting the drive in and never have to touch them again. The power cables are the real bonus. Two power connectors which distribute the power to all the drives. Doing this with splitters on individual drive can be a mess. My previous setup was a bit of a mess, it’s very clean now because of these.
The design of the airflow is smart. Holes in the front and one single fan on the back that pulls air through. The only thing I could think to improve on this would be to have some kind of insert for empty drive bays. As it is, the bulk of the air will flow though the empty slots.
I took the cage apart to look at the circuit board, and apart from the LED indicators, it appears that this is just a straight pass-through of the connections from the drive to the SATA connectors on the back. I was worried it had a controller onboard, or something like that.
Other general comments:
The drive lights are a nice touch. The locks aren’t really keyed locks, but they’re good if you just want to keep from accidentally ejecting the wrong disk. The drive cages looks really cool when installed. You can install 5 drives in the space that would otherwise hold 4. Cons: Each drive bay door is connected to a lever on the back of the bay, so that when you insert a drive, it closes the door part way. Likewise, when you open the bay door, it pops the drive out of the bay. This works pretty well, but sometimes it feels like it takes too much force and I worry that I’ll break the mechanism. So when inserting and ejecting a drive, do it slowly. When inserting a drive, it helps if you close the bay door a little to help it along.
The biggest gripe I have with this is with the fan housing. It uses an 80mm fan, and you should be able to replace it with your own fan. The way the fan is mounted, you would need to buy the same exact size fan as was included, down to the holes on the fan itself. In my case, I bought an Arctic Cooling F8 PWM fan. The fan holes were too small, and the width of the fan was too large. I ended up taking a Dremel to the holes. Because of the width, the box that covers the fan has a small gap, but this doesn’t affect the function of the fan. I had to buy longer screws to get them to mount properly. So, you can get it to work, but it was a real pain.
iStarUSA should modify their fan mount on their next design iteration to use a more standard fan mounting method that allows for variations in fan dimensions.
Despite these issues, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy this product again.

Pros: Have had one in my unraid server for over two years, just got a second, and I have the single drive version in an extra machine for pre-clearing. For the price, they are solid. I have no experience with the fans, as I remove them and let my case do the cooling. Drives insert easily and lock in solid each time, no quality issues with any of the ones I have. Will be ordering at least one more 5-bay later on. Cons: Doors can be a little flimsy but I’m not adding or removing drives very often, so no biggie. Again, for the price, can’t be beat. Other reviews I’ve read say the fan can be loud. It has a switch for high/low, plus you can always replace (or remove) it. No con worth knocking an egg off for. Overall Review: Awesome for home file servers. Beats the pants off of tray-based designs for ease of use.

Pros: Latches and drive engagement feels positive. No “plastic doodads” begging to be broken. Fan quiet for it’s size and speed adjustment works well. Cons: Orientation of drive is not obvious without another drive to reference, have to peer inside the unit to reference the SATA connector. Not sure there is really a solution to this problem. SATA cables come straight out the back and positioning relative to fan housing prevents the use of right angle SATA cable. Overall Review: Fan housing protrudes, check overall length against your proposed installation.

Pros: Nice looking.
Doors can be “locked,” but they’re pretty fragile, so don’t count on that for security.
I like that I can open the door enough to see the serial number sticker on the drive without interrupting its use.
The fan is not as loud as other reviewers have said (perhaps this is a new model). Cons: Like everyone else has said – the cooling is woefully insufficient. They are using a standard 80mm x 20mm fan now, so it’s possible to replace it with a higher flow fan. The included fan is rated at 2 Watts, which puts it in the range of about 35 CFM. To go beyond that, you will have to shop elsewhere (Newegg’s selection caps out at 38CFM) and will end up adding a lot of noise. It will be difficult to modify the cage to use a larger fan because it will cover the SATA or power ports or the dip switches that are on 3 sides of the fan.
After taking this apart, it really looks like the main impediment to airflow is the design itself. The backplane has only a single small cutout for air to flow through. The drive doors are filled with holes, however behind those holes is a piece of metal that is used to push the drive into place and blocks all of that airflow. So basically, the only intake air you get is from the gaps between the doors, which can only flow down the sides, behind the backplane and out through the fan.
While formatting 4 disks as a RAID5 array, I had to open the doors and rig up a desk fan to keep the drives from overheating. With only the built-in fan, the drives quickly shot up to 45C before I got additional cooling on them. Once the drives switched to normal, light use and the supplemental cooling was removed, the drives stabilized at around 41-43C, which is still too high for my comfort. I designed and 3d printed a 120mm fan header to replace the built in 80mm fan and cover, attached a pretty high volume fan, connected it to a 12v rail, and even then my drives don’t run much cooler. You can download and print my design from thingiverse, just search for item number 2851287.
I wish the power connectors were on the other side of the cage. As it is, they are on the back as you look into your case. This makes connecting the power a royal pain in the neck. And speaking of power connectors, they are side by side so you must use straight plugs. They should have been stacked so the angled plugs many power supplies have could be used as well. Fortunately, I had a couple Molex to straight SATA power adapters, and since nothing uses Molex anymore, I had plenty of plugs available.
The fan speed selection dip switch (low vs. high) didn’t change the fan speed on either of the units I purchased.
All labeling (port numbers, and switch settings) are raised letters in the plastic, so they are impossible to read except in perfect lighting.
I would have preferred a separate power and activity indicator rather than the dual color LED they have used. Overall Review: Every picture of this drive cage shows the disks horizontal, so some may not realize that when installed, your drives will be vertical. Further, for the mounting holes to line up, the cage must be aligned such that the doors swing down (key and release on top).
If your case has guide tabs for 5.25″ drives, you will need to bend them out of the way or this disk cage will not fit – and in my Cooler Master HAF 912 case, they were tougher than they looked.
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Final assessment: Unless you are using low power (like WD green) drives, you do not want this hard drive cage. The cooling is simply not adequate.