Easy Caddy for SSD Drives, Part 2
I wrote in an earlier article about a 2.5" drive caddy that holds two 2.5" drives in a 3.5" drive bay. I purchased 3 of them to install in systems at my home. I finally got the first installed into my Mediacenter PC and I am in love! If you have smaller form factor drives in a system with 3.5" bays, you got to get yourself one of these.
In several of my systems, I have moved from the internal hard disk drives to SSDs, specifically Samsung 830 SSD's. They are great performing drives and have incredible longevity from my experience. Other SSD manufacturers have fallen short while the Samsung 830's continue to impress me. I am at the point of having almost all of my systems utilizing Samsung 830's of some size where I manage the hardware.
When installing the SSD's into the systems, there is no easy way to install. Some manufacturers included a 2.5" to 3.5" installation piece but none of my Samsung 830's included that. As such, they were set into the case loose because there was no good place to install them. Since they have no moving pieces, I was not worried at all. I did want to find a better way to keep them and found it thanks to Amazon.
In searching around, I found the StarTech.com 2 Drive 2.5-Inch Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane (HSB220SAT25B)
My first installation was into my Mediacenter where I had two SSDs installed, a Samsung 830 128GB boot drive and a Samsung 830 256GB data drive. Removing the drives and setting up the backplane was simple. I installed the StarTech.com Backplane into the 3.5" floppy drive bay, making a beautiful installation.
This was a very easy installation for me. I can't wait to get these installed into my servers with their SSD's. One thing I can test there is that my servers have hot swap capabilities. I will make one more post on that specific installation.
Do you have SSD's in your systems? Could you use an installation system like this to help you? What have you used for installation of small SSD's into your cases?
