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Hands up if you have a few spare 2.5 inch laptop drives sitting in a drawer gathering dust? I would say quite a few reading this have their grubby mitts in the air already … this article will be of particular interest to you all.
Startech are probably not that well known to most of us, however they they have been in operation since 1985 and have won many awards over the decades for their customer service and production quality. They supply over 2,000 products across 43 product lines and over 40,000 resellers worldwide have been supplying their goods across 25 years.
I will be honest, when most companies approach me asking if I would like to review their latest gadget such as a ‘USB powered desktop fan' or a ‘can cooler' I tend to run in the other direction. This one is slightly different. Why? well I would actually find a use for this in the real world.
The principle is simple. You use the device to house a 2.5 inch drive, then you mount it internally inside a desktop chassis (PCI slot) with the rear tray system accessible from the outside via a drive bay. You can then swap out the drives without opening your case or fiddling with power connectors. Want a new drive installed? hit an eject button and pull. Well nifty.
The S25SLOTR (no I doubt its a reference to The Lord Of The Rings, calm down), is supplied in a very simple white box with minimal imagery (bonus points if you spot the typo).
Its a pretty strong box and should withstand abuse during shipping.
The bundle contains a well written reference guide, a SATA cable, protective drive cover, mounting screw, power leads and obviously the unit itself.
The Drive bay is well packaged in protective foam and the power cabling is held inside the unit itself.
The underside is sexy aluminum while the surrounding panels are steel, for strength.
Above we can see the power connector area – this is used to feed connectors to the internal power supply of the system, in exactly the same way you would with a 3.5 inch drive.
The power cable is a straightforward splitter – from sata to molex, meaning all power supplies will easily support it. You use this to connect to your PSU, and a sata cable (supplied) to your motherboard.
The first thing you need to do is grab one of the drives gathering dust in your drawer. The more observant among you will notice the little Apple logo on the drive above. This was removed from one of my Macbooks when I upgraded to an SSD, which verifies my point earlier – we all have 2.5 inch drives lying around doing very little!
The next stage is to use the handy supplied protective cover to cover the undersurface of your 2.5 inch drive. We found it isn't really needed, but its a nice additional touch from Startech.
We used a high intensity flash on the picture above to show you the underside of the drive with the protective cover fitted.
Fitting the drive is very straightforward. Push the eject button, slide it in …
… and close it.
Hook up the sata to molex converter and sata cable then open up your desktop PC chassis.
For the system build we are using a Silverstone Raven 02 chassis so the mounting is vertical. All is left is to connect the sata cable to the motherboard and the power cable to the power supply.
The drive bay can be fitted anywhere you have a slot free – and if you don't have any slots free then I guess you could just mount it with the 3.5 inch units although you would need to open the case if you wanted to change the drive.
Above you can see the Drive bay fitted in the far left slot – to remove the drive you simply just push the eject button and pull. Replacing the drive is easy and only takes a few seconds.
Reviewing a drive bay isn't a wonderful proposition because lets be honest they aren't exactly the sexiest bits of hardware you can get. This one however is very practical and when they approached me I immediately thought this is something many people might use, especially if like me, they horde hard drives from previous builds.
The StarTech S25SLOTR is a well crafted bay using both steel for ultimate strength on the side rods and aluminum for heat dissipating properties. The bundle covers everything you could possibly need and they even include a protective drive cover.
So in closing, if you have 2.5 inch drives sitting gathering dust then this bay can turn them all into easily accessible storage drives for your desktop system. It is well built and will certainly last across many system builds.
The price is a reasonably competitive $37.99 in the states and £23.99 in the UK.
KitGuru Says: An easy way to add fast, accessible storage to your desktop system.
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Kit
Seems like a handy little tool, ive some 2.5s here, would be useful for storage.