SagAzon: Kingwin 2.5-Inch / 3.5-Inch Internal SATA Tray-Less Hot Swap Rack KF-252-BK

Kingwin 2.5-Inch / 3.5-Inch Internal SATA Tray-Less Hot Swap Rack KF-252-BK

Computer 5.25 Drawer

Kingwin 2.5-Inch / 3.5-Inch Internal SATA Tray-Less Hot Swap Rack KF-252-BK

computer 5.25 drawer - click on the image below for more information.

LED light for power and HDD activity
Fits all 2.5" and 3.5" SATA hard disks
Fits in one 5 1/4 drive bay
No inner tray required
Patented non-scratch SATA connector with 50K insertion rate
Compatible with all types of PC cases
Supports hot swap
Tool-less design for HDD installation

computer 5.25 drawer

An easy and convenient solution for your hdd storage. Compatible with both 2.5" and 3.5" hdd, this unit will let you access your data on your drives in an instant. Fully plug and play, hot swappable, and simple to use.

List Price: $ 15.99 Price: $ 15.94

Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

The only dual 2.5" / 3.5" bay available, but FAKE FAN!, May 30, 2011

someone-canada - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Kingwin 2.5-Inch / 3.5-Inch Internal SATA Tray-Less Hot Swap Rack KF-252-BK (Personal Computers)

The drive bay is comes with some pros and cons.

Pros:
- As of the date of this review, it is the only bay that fits both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives.
- It also allows the use of either a SATA or a Molex power connector.
- The power switch is very convenient and allows the drive to be turned off prior to removal.

Cons:
- Because it fits both 2.5/3.5 drives, the drive must hang out of the device. Many 3.5"-only bays allow the drive to be inserted entirely.
- Temperature problem, as noted by the previous reviewer. This is likely because the device does not have a fan. But wait, doesn't the picture show that it has a fan? Yes, but the fan is FAKE! It's a deceptive piece of plastic that looks like a fan.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Easy, Basic, Quick, Plus Buttonless Removal - Great for Testing, March 13, 2012

Sam Candle "Sam" (SAN JOSE, CA, US) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Kingwin 2.5-Inch / 3.5-Inch Internal SATA Tray-Less Hot Swap Rack KF-252-BK (Personal Computers)

If you have to swap a lot of drives in and out of a RAID quickly, this is vastly superior to the expensive and space-consuming USB docking stations.

Also, I have tested every other trayless hot swap SATA bay for a 5.25" case slot, and they all have some kind of button to press, lever to pull, or both before you can remove the drive.

For those of us who just need to put the drive in, run a quick scan, and take it out, this is the only drive that doesn't have that added hassle.

For long term drive installation, this would need a fan installed, but that's not its purpose.

Add to that the capability of dealing with the smaller form factors, and this bay will serve anyone in the IT industry with a tower who has to deal with backups from hard drives or IDE SATA diagnostics.

I have 12 more 5.25" slots to fill, and I'm warming to the idea of just putting these in all of them.

Based on all of the above, I would give this 4 stars, especially given Kingwin's lame attempt to make it look like this had a fan in the back.

However, the low price wins that fifth star right back.

To get hot swap to work, the SATA controller that the drives connect to must support AHCI or RAID. Also, the AHCI or RAID feature must be enabled in the BIOS, since it's usually left off for compatibility with XP and older operating systems. If the BIOS does not list AHCI as an option, you're out of luck. No hot swap for you.

If it's enabled in the BIOS, but still no joy, you may need to install an AHCI driver for your operating system. In Linux this is relatively easy, just yum or apt-get a later kernel.

Otherwise, there are fearsome windows registry tweaks, slipstreaming, and the "F6" method.

I don't know about Macs, but I suspect Kingwin might have to make a much shinier, more expensive version of this with a fruit logo for any mac users to buy this.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Worth the price, November 28, 2011

Gary Keene "Eclectic Reader" (Carlsbad, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Kingwin 2.5-Inch / 3.5-Inch Internal SATA Tray-Less Hot Swap Rack KF-252-BK (Personal Computers)

You can hardly go wrong at this price. I'm the guy who gets tasked with fixing the computers of friends and family. My standard procedure now, when somebody is suffering drive problems, is to pull the drive out of their desktop or laptop and plug it into this rack in a different diagnostic computer, where I mount it as the "D" drive. I have a sandbox user account using PC Safeguard that isolates the questionable drive from my good drives. I then do a complete virus, trojan and rootkit scan on the drive followed by sector scan and optimization. Some virus and rootkits are able to hide when you scan the infected drive from within the original computer, but they are revealed when you can scan the drive as a secondary drive in some other computer. In fact, I've fixed 100% of the problem drives that were presented to me, except for one drive that was physically damaged.

The point of my story is, I have used this drive bay to repair about 18 different drives, including both 2.5" laptop drives and 3.5" desktop drives. Every drive has connected properly when I plugged it in. The best story I have concerns a drive where the plastic housing around the SATA data connector was broken, so it would not grip a SATA cable and therefore there was no way to read the data off the drive. However, after I carefully bent all the free-floating pins into alignment, I was able to gently slide the drive into the drive bay and I did get a good data connection. The mating connector inside the drive is held rigidly in place, unlike a flexible SATA cable, so I was able to extract all the data off the drive through the broken connector.

However, this rack is definitely cheaply made. The housing is thin and flimsy. As others have noted, the "fan" shown in the pictures is totally fake - just a non-functional plastic simulation of fan blades. Also, for most people this will not be a true "Hot-Swap" rack because hot-swapping requires AHCI, and most boards default to legacy IDE mode. I plug the drive in with the rack power supply off, then I power it up and I go into Device Manager to scan for hardware changes, which causes the drive to be recognized and mounted. Or you can install the "HotSwap!" utility.

I don't think I would recommend this as a hot swap rack for critical data, but for occasional use it seems to be OK and I've had no problem connecting to a variety of drives.

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