Kingwin Solid State Hybrid Drive SSHD/HDD Enclosure, Internal Three Hot Swap Bay Mobile Rack for 3.5” Solid State Hybrid Drive, SATA Backplane Enclosure, Support SATA I/II/III & SAS I/II 6 Gbps

Well, I finally upgraded my old AMD Sempron 145 Unraid server after 11 years of service. My "plan" was to re-use my trusty Norco SS-400 drive bays, despite purchasing them in a different era and featuring a maximum specification of SATAII speeds. Upon upgrading my SAS HBA to 6gbps SATAIII speeds, that "plan" fell apart. I started seeing errors on a few of the drives. After a couple of disabled drive events due to write errors, I knew I had to replace the drive bays.Unfortunately, it seems like the drive bay market doesn't have any "clear" winners these days. After a lengthy search, these Kingwin's appeared to be about as "premium" as one can get these days. I pulled the trigger on three of these Kingpin's to fully replace my finely aged Norco's. I planned to replace the fan immediately as I know these units always come with loud, obnoxious and typically poorly performing fans.I read over the specs and I knew these units came with an odd sized 80x80x15mm fan. I thought, "How dumb would you have to be to not support the most common fan in the world, 80x80x25mm? Well, I'll kill the suspense. These are THAT dumb. You can make it work, but definitely not well. To get my Noctua NF-A8 FLX 3 PIN fans sufficiently secured, I could not install the drive bay's fan protector over the fan with the supplied screws. A longer screw by just 1mm would have done it. So, now my fans are just sitting out there, waiting to eat a SAS cable one of these days. The whole fan mount is odd, too, I can easily think of very minor design tweaks that would have greatly improved the fan installation. Had I known the fans would be exposed, I definitely would have selected one of Noctua's "prettier" fans.But wait, it gets worse. The drive bay's fan connector of course doesn't use the industry standard 3-pin Dupont style connector like you'd see in every 3rd party case fan sold today. No, it uses the micro-style Dupont connector, the likes you would see on enterprise network or server hardware and ultra compact equipment. The 3-pin Dupont connector has been around in PC's since the 1980's, at least! Maybe there are adapters, who knows? Frankly, there's only so much I'm willing to put into a poor design choices to "make it right." I just brought the fan connectors back to my motherboard through some PWM fan splitters. It's a hack job, but it works I guess.I just find it hard to believe such a disregard for common standards can still be a thing in 2022. I expected this kind of thing ten years ago, not these days. Even my decade plus old drive bays were built properly, so there's just no excuse.Enough of the complaints. The drive bays are actually quite nice. They are made from metal and are attractive for the most part. I went from a tray design to trayless, which I was a bit hesitant about. Turns out, trayless is pretty sweet. I had no problems with fitting the 4-in-3 into my case, it slid right into the rails. I also liked that these new bays shaved off probably 2 inches of depth compared to my Norco bays, which gave my motherboard's rear facing SATA ports a bit more berth. If you don't like the rather bright LED's on the individual bays, a switch can be set to turn them off. I don't mind them (for now, subject to change) and I really like that they indicate drive usage - a missing feature on my Norco's.I had no technical troubles to speak of, which is decidedly a win. (Though I did have to mod my case with a Dremel to fit three drive bays on my original build 11 years ago.) All 12 drive bays were immediately responsive, negotiating at 6gbps SATAIII. I run a mix of 16TB and 8TB Seagate hard drives at this time, though I'd be surprised to see a drive bay be incompatible with drive sizes. It's really more about cooling ability and the means of staying within drive specifications. Possibly a silver lining to the fan issues described above, the motherboard's PWM control of the fans does make for a slightly quieter operation most of the time.Probably most important, cooling capability. One of the very first things I did was run a parity check, which rips all 12 drives at full speed for around 16 hours. It's a serious stress test and will push drive bays to their limit. My Norco cases would peak at 115F with ambient air in the mid-to-high 60's, hot but still within my drive specifications. The Kingwin's perform pretty much identically, probably on account of using the same fan. This offers me a bit of breathing room for higher ambient temperatures, since my drive's peak operating temperature is 149F. I'd be concerned if I ever saw indoor ambient air temperatures above 100F, though.So, what's the final verdict? Assuming no troubles come my way, and I'll update if I do have them - I do recommend these Kingwin 4-in-3 drive bays. They're probably about as good as it'll get at this time. I'm frustrated by the fan issues, but I won't see it because my server isn't some RGB freak show in a glass case. If I were doing a higher end build, I'd probably spend the effort to find the right screws. I'd also terminate my own Dupont fan adapter, but I'm way too unmotivated to do it for a utilitarian server build. I'm hoping this will be a good storage foundation for another 10+ years.

I bought this as a HDD expansion on a standard desktop PC and not a server rack. It fit the slot well and has multiple power cable options which is nice. It came with 2 pads which seemed to large to go anywhere. Only downside was the tiny fan. It works well, but it is loud. Once on it ramps up quickly and never seems to to slow down, making a notable buzz that can't be missed. That is useful for a server rack, but not for a desktop PC. Thankfully the fan is easily removed to no negative effect

Out of all the similar products I've seen on the market, these seem to be the best. Granted, I have not purchased each of everything on the market, nor do I have that kind of money, but I have to say that this product is not worth the $40 (plus tax)I paid for them.Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and a great idea it is. My purpose is for quick deployment and backup of individual systems, and this product (or similar products) is great for that. If you don't understand the benefits, look it up, that's not part of a product review.So the bad parts of this product are below.This product, as shown in the pictures are very visually pleasing. However, the "locking latches" are not metal. They look like aluminum castings, and for $20, (my bad) I assumed they were metal. Right out of the box, I thought there were blemishes on the latches, but they are areas the paint or plating hadn't adhered to "the plastic latch". So that was a big let-down, but they are still functional. I would save a few bucks buy buying the same one, unpainted.Next are the USB ports. I've also attached a photo of how unsightly the two USB ports are. They aren't even straight. Is it a big deal? No, but the value of $40 continues to diminish. It's one of those things that... a year from now, you would think to yourself, "this things bugs me every day. Why didn't I return it when I had a chance".Now for the ON/OFF switch on the left side. My question is... "WHY?" Is it to save power? Can't you turn off the drives via software? Can't you pull out the drive you're not using? I thought it was odd. Without tracing the wires back, because MOST non-tech-savy buyers wouldn't know to, I randomly flipped the switch and both drives shut off and my system started hanging. I had to turn flip the switch back on, went into Device Manager and rescanned drives and things went back to normal. So, this switch is pretty pointless. It actually interrupts the clean look of the front face.Speaking the front face, the plastic is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP plastic. Not that most of us would think about using this kind of equipment outdoors, but I highly doubt this thing would survive 24 hours under the sun's rays, and I'm sure the manufacturer knows this. It feels like the cheap plastic the Chinese use in cheap Chinese toys. Be really careful of the plastic bridge right above the 2.5" drive slot. It's literally a thin plastic bridge and I nearly broke it as I was holding it inverted, looking at the bottom of the unit. Again, the value (not the cost) of this product continues to decline.So we're still on the cheap-streak. Turning to the innards, all the metal parts are equally as cheap. Everything is THIN sheet metal. I remember back in the day, this kind of thing could withstand a tank rolling over it. Maybe I'm exaggerating but I wouldn't be surprised if I could crush this thing with a dictionary. I have one around here somewhere... They didn't even bother to debur the edges and you could easily cut your digits by handling this product in any non-ginger way.I use Hard Disk Sentinel to monitor my drives so I have temperature values to share. At present, I have 4 drives running on my computer:Internal 3.5, attached to the chassis (Dell), an external 2.5 in a plastic case, and the Kingwin chassis with a 3.5 and 2.5 drive. The internal drive is running at a cool 32-35C. The external is running at 23-27C. The two drives in the Kingwin are running in the 40-45C range. As I'm writing this review, all drives are hardly doing anything and these are the temperature variants. For $40, they could have attached a couple 40mm fans in the back to pull some of that hot air away. Surely even the ambient heat at idle would greatly reduce the life of the drives in this chassis. I have a similar 3x 3.5 drive cage installed in a server which has an 80mm fan in the back for exactly this reason. Granted, it was $70... but it has actual anodized aluminum latches.I do like the fact that this chassis is suspended on shock absorbers, but the holes were JUST off, making them a little tricky to get the screws in, but once it's in, it's in. I really like the idea of this product and I MAY buy more, but surely not for $40. It's not worth $40. I paid about $20 for my StarTech single drive enclosure, which is pretty much the same build quality. So, I would say the value of this product isn't more than $30 in my opinion. To make this product worth $40 or even $50, the manufacturer would need to switch to the standard ABS plastic for all the plastic bits, a bit heavier gauge sheet metal for all the shiny bits, and add a cooling fan or two in the rear. Cast latches would be nice too, and I would pay the full $50-55 for those modifications. But I wouldn't pay more than $30 for this product as it is.

Item took just a week to arrive from the US, so pretty quick. Better quality than the competition variants and I prefer this push in / pull out variant to the ones that have an eject button as this system is simpler and much less to go wrong.Fitting was fairly easy, but beware that some cases have easy-fit latches on the sides of the 5.25inch bays and this will not be compatible with such latches, so you'll have to pull those off first, which in my case left only one set of holes on each side to attach this item (couldn't attach the rear two holes with screws) but with just the front two it was still quite firmly enough attached).I am pleased with the device, it seems sturdy and well made and is fast without the issues of high resource usage or slow disconnects you get with the Usb variants. Great that it has a power button too.The only negative: in the description you see the word "hot swap" - note that this is NOT hot swap in the true sense of the word. While you can remove one HDD from it while the PC is still in Windows, when you plug in the 2nd HDD you can't access it until you have done a reboot of the PC. Also if you boot up the PC with no HDD in the slot, on my setup I found that I can't then plug in an HDD after I've booted into it windows as it simply won't find it until rebooting with the drive inserted upon startup. This really sux!I use the latest top of the range PC with Windows 10 v1809. All drivers fully updates.

Had intermittent issues detecting drives. Modified it by removing circuitry and attaching a direct sata adapter to the motherboard which works 100% now (as long as your bios supports hot-swapping!).

hot swap-able not reallythis must be powered up and have a hdd/ssd in itto change hdd/ssd, power off replace hdd/ssd and power onit will then function okay

Nicely made product, fast delivery also.

What I received I assume was the KF-255-BK (because that's what Amazon says I bought) but the unit has no model number on it. Some of the reviews here are obviously talking about something else because what I have can accept either 3.5 inch hard drives, 2.5 inch hard drives and I assume SSDs. There are no locks of any kind. There is a front door with a cutout for 2.5 inch drives and the door is spring loaded and swings in and up for 3.5 inch drives. The 'Power' LED is red and the 'Access' LED is green. There is a spot at the back of the unit for a very small fan although none is installed. If you look at the minimal clearances around an inserted 3.5 inch drive you will see that a fan in the back of the unit would be pretty much useless anyway. This is my first warning, namely that hard drives do get hot, some (with the highest platter speeds) get very hot so this is not the ideal unit to leave a 3.5 inch drive inserted for extended periods of time. I actually cut a large circular hole in the top of my dock to allow at least some air circulation for inserted drives. The unit has two side metal brackets to secure it in a 5.25 inch drive bay. The design of them is strange with peculiar spaced screw holes and the dock can only be fastened with 1 screw per side, which means it is stable at the front plate if the case above and below it is tight against it. It really does not work well with cases that use screw-less sliders to secure drives, such as the case I installed it in. I drilled out the rivets that connected the four feet to the side brackets and remounted the unit in the shell of a dead DVD drive; it took a little cutting and reworking of the DVD case but now the dock is properly and firmly installed.The dock connects to a standard SATA power connector and a SATA port on the computer motherboard. Here is where things get complicated, because the standard SATA ports on motherboards are not by design hot-swappable. There may be some motherboards where the CMOS ('BIOS') does permit designating a specific SATA port as hot-swappable but I don't think any of my computers have that option. The hard drives (or SSDs) that are inserted into any dock should be regarded and handled in the same way was you handle USB thumb drives, media cards, portable USB hard drives or external US drives (self powered) such that after you have read and especially written files to and from them you must properly eject (unmount) the devices before disconnecting them, otherwise you will, sooner or later, get file corruption and often actual disk corruption that may be only correctable by reformatting the hard drive. Users of linux, at least experienced users like myself, already know how to mount and cleanly unmount devices, even drives in docks connected through SATA ports. But for Windows the standard procedure, for example in Windows 7, is to go to the icon in the task bar in the lower right and click on the 'safely eject and remove media' icon, then click on the device (in this case the drive in the dock) you wish to eject. Drives inserted in this KF-255-BK dock will not appear in that list and so the only safe way to remove the drive is to either shutdown the computer (and then turn the power off to the dock and remove the drive) or reboot the computer and at restart turn off the dock power and remove the drive. There are free utilities for Windows that are supposed to solve the problem of safely ejecting drives in SATA connected docks. You may also have luck with some command line instructions in a DOS/Command shell/terminal.