Most Useful Computer Accessory of This Year: 4 x 2.5” in 5.25” MiniSAS Enclosure

American company StarTech has recently presented the SATSAS425BK 4-Drive 2.5” SATA/SAS Hot-swap Backplane on its official website. The SATSAS425BK will allow you to install four 2.5" SATA and/or SAS hard drives into a single 5.25” front bay. 

Having a strong background in server and workstation hardware, I was put many times in a situation where, to allow installation of supplemental SAS HDD or SSD drives, I had to manually manufacture holding/installation bays.

I bore special holes in the metal casing of the system to be able to securely anchor the supplemental drives in the system and I had to design and manually build cable routing and securing accessories.

SSDs are so popular that many clients were requesting a RAID5 or RAID6 configuration next to the other eight, twelve of twenty four SAS drives inside the server. There was a lot of work to fit, secure, and cool of the extra heat from 4 or 6 extra 2.5” drives may they be SAS HDD or SSDs.

Now, with StarTech’s new product, using a single Mini SAS SFF-8087 interface for quick setup and easy maintenance and with removable trays, each drive can be replaced or swapped out without having to open up the system’s chassis.

Each removable tray has a locking mechanism that prevents unauthorized tampering with the drives, and also has power and activity LEDs. The accessory supports up to 15mm height 2.5” hard drives or SSDs.

The backplane also comes with a 40mm cooling fan to help increase air flow.

This way you can install an amazing number of at least 24 SSD or SAS drives in a full tower case using only the 5.25” bays. Add to this all the internal 3.5” bays and you have yourself a very fast storage monster.

The price in UK is 93.59 GBP including the value added tax. For the rest of Europe the price should be around 114 EUR and the US based customers should be able to get it for less than 150 USD.

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