Removable hard drive bays
 

I am browsing online vendors, but also seeking recommendations for removable front-side hard drive trays for both 2.5 and 3.5 inch hard drives. What are you using and happy with?

I am building a test system. A tower case with four front-side panels. I want to quickly clone disks and partitions of both disk sizes. That means two concurrent 2.5 and 3.5 inch disk bays or a mix of either. Combo trays are fine but if 4 trays are ideal then that's okay.

I prefer trays with a key/switch to physically remove power.

I prefer not to monkey with 3.5-to-2.5 inch adapter kits but I can live with that if a recommended tray is decent quality.

Edit: I'm looking for specific device models that you have and like.

Thanks again! :)

these 'drive bays' used to be very popular,

but after a while, their contacts may become faulty, during prolonged use-age.

I used to dual boot this way: I would have a windoze drive, a Linux drive, etc. I never had any issues with contacts wearing out but only used this set up for a year or 2, back in the late 90's, early 2k's.

Now I have a USB drive "caddy" for lack of a better word. You can plug 3.5 or 2.5 drives into it and it powers then and provides a data channel so you can view or wipe the drives.

An ordinary SATA connector has a design life of only 50 insertions. The connectors on most drives don't wear out nearly that fast, but you're going to be exceeding the design spec pretty quickly by swapping bare drives in and out of an enclosure. The very similar eSATA connector is rated for 5000 matings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#eSATA

At work we have used removable drive adapters from many vendors. The servers tend to come with them.

Unless a bay is hotswappable I generally suggest full power down. The key is just a fall out device.

Well, poo. I edited my original post to clarify that I'm looking for specific device models that you have and like.