Experience with Internal SATA hotswap

[Cr0nJ0b]

I'm building a small RAID box for some of my SATA drives and I was wondering if anyone has experience with the internal drive boxes. Newegg has a bunch of them with some mixed reviews.

supermicro and Icy Dock are the two that I'm looking at closely. The reviews for most of these seem mixed.

Icy Dock enclosure

What I'm most interested in is:

1) SATAII support
2) Small with at least 5 bays
3) Hot Swap Shuttles
4) Cooling -- Airflow etc.
5) Something that is well built
6) don't need multi-lane
7) MUST BE INTERNAL

one other question for anyone who knows...Do all SATA II controllers support Hot-Swap? Is this an OS support thing? A controller thing?

I plan to attach drives to SATA onboard and external card. I'll be using software RAID and the OS will be a linux derivative (OpenFiler).

thanks

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have 3 of the Supermicro 5-in-3 SATA enclosures, although I'm only running 1 right now. The Supermicro ones are very well built and definitely worth the $110-130 they go for on newegg. The fan is a bit loud for some though. For hot-swap support, you are going to have to check the drive, controller, enclosure, and OS. All of them have to work together in order to support hot swapping correctly, so I would look at each device you plan on getting seperately.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Thanks for the response. I saw the review for the SuperMicro and it looks ok. I'm intreagued by the ICY Dock, because of the slick look, but Airflow is king for me.

Here is a list of options that I'm looking at right now.


Icy Dock MB455 $119
SNT SATA3051B $109
Supermicro CSE M35T1 $109
I-Star BPU-350SATA $92
AMS DK-0357S5 $169
Enhance Storpack S35 $125
AMS DS-3151S5BK $119
Enlight EN-8721A02 $144
Startech SATABAY5BK $120

lots of choices.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Well, I'm close to making the final bid, between the SuperMicro and the IcyDoc. Does anyone else have input on these? good or bad experiences?