Silverstone Techology FS304-V Three (3) 5.25" Bay to Four (4) 3.5" SAS 12G / SATA 6G Trayless Hot-swap Cage, SST-FS304B-V

Works great - but that fan! I bought this to be used in my backup server and like its metal counterpart it works beautifully, you can extract, change, and reinstall a drive as if it were child's play. My only complaint about the physical mechanism is that the drive trays are a bit harder to extract than I would prefer. Overall if you need a (relatively) inexpensive hot-swappable drive enclosure this would be well suited. I will say yes, it's less expensive than the trayless one and does the job exactly the same - if you can spend the money, get the trayless one! In the manual they say you can connect the fan to a fan header on your motherboard - I did this to decrease the fan whine but it didn't make that much of a difference. My only other thing I can think of is to replace it (and you can since it's a standard 92mm fan) with something a bit quieter. Only thing is replacing said noisy fan requires taking out the drives (all), unplugging all cables to it, and then taking out the distribution board to get to the fan screws. It's a fairly simple process, but it's not a 5 minute job - so beware.

This is ideal for the rack mount case that I'm putting together - I'm already using the three existing 5-1/4" bays for a tape and an optical drive, so I'm replacing one of the 120mm front fan and 5x 3-1/2" drive combo bays with this. A bonus is that if I don't have SAS drives handy for whatever reason, or I need to use laptop drives, this unit has the flexibility to allow me to use SATA or different footprint drives. The actual cage is made of ridiculously heavy gauge metal; it would be difficult to damage, I think. And while I could wish the plastic trays were a little more robust, with care they should last longer than the case itself, and they are easy and precise in regard to insertion and removal. The only surprise in the description was that I had to guess the fan size from the part number in the photo, and I guessed wrong. I thought it had a 120mm fan; it turned out to be 80mm, but it is a nice PWM fan.

Terrific construction but the small fan, which is riveted in place and difficult to replace, is quite loud. A larger more standardized fan that could be replaced easily for something quieter would be more suitable for an item intended to be used for years. It’s literally the loudest part of the entire build.

Works perfectly in my unraid server. No noise from the unit at all, fits perfectly in the case. Highly recommended.

My old one didn’t even have a built in fan.