Installation

Installation is easy. Just slide the HDD rack into the 5 1/4" bay and mount it with the four screws provided just as you would with a CD/DVD drive. Insert the HDD about 3/4 of the way into the unit, then let the door and mechanism guide it in the rest of the way. It should be noted that the swapping of hard disks should be done with the system powered down to ensure that no data gets corrupted. The front of the unit matches nicely with an aluminum case and resembles a brushed aluminum finish. When powered up, the light above the key illuminates indicating there is power, and when the HDD is accessed the bottom light flickers into operation.

Performance

For testing we used a 3.5" Western Digital 160 GB 7200 RPM 8 MB cache HDD. Since the SATA/SAS and power connectors inside the T-5 SS are nothing more than interconnects, there should be no difference in performance with a HDD as opposed to connecting a hard disk directly to the motherboard. Testing shows just that with nearly identical performance readings between using the T-5 SS Mobile Rack and connecting directly to the motherboard. The unit performed without a problem, good read/write speeds, no vibration, and not a whisper from the 40mm fan inside the rack.