Easy Caddy for SSD Drives

As I am working on my systems at home, I am noticing a larger use of 2.5 inch drives in my systems. This is due to the increased use of solid state drives (SSD). In fact, in my newer server rig I spoke about, I have mirrored SSDs for the OS. To help make it easier for installation of these drives into my systems, I looked for a nice drive caddy and found one!

Solid State Drives are a new standard anymore for computer systems, especially for operating systems and data that is needed fast. The larger, "slower" platter-based drives are great for storage long-term and of large data that does not need to be returned fast. I have seen servers that receive, process and forward files onto other systems outperform the software written to do this when SSD's are used.

In my home network, I have replaced almost all of the operating system drives in my systems with SSD's. The one problem I have had in most of my applications is the physical installation of the drive. Some drives include a 2.5" drive to 3.5" drive installation kit. This is not very common though. On top of that, easy access to the drives in case of failures is a priority for me. This was more important with my original SSD's but has not been an issue with the Samsung 830's I have been using lately. (I am knocking on wood now that I have jinxed myself here.)

Going through Amazon, I think I found the answer … StarTech.com 2 Drive 2.5-Inch Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane (HSB220SAT25B). It provides a dual 2.5" trayless installation point within a 3.5" drive space. In looking at all of my systems, there is an old 3.5" floppy area. I never use this anymore for drives, sometimes installing a media card reader.

Given this, I am ordering a few in to try out this weekend in my systems. I will post an update to this post to give you all my findings and some technical knowledge from Rick Smith on how the backplane has been built to provide the hot swap capabilities.