ceemuk

Preparing a new build and had set myself a budget or around £200 GBP for storage.

Originally was going to go for 3x identical 500GB for RAID 0 and 1x 1.5TB backup\storage.

However have now decided to allocate some funds out of the budget for a hard drive caddy at the sacrifice of one of the RAID drives; 2x 640GB WD Blacks for RAID 0, 1x 1.5TB WD Black for storage\backup. 3 drive caddy for them all.

The main reason is air flow in my case, an Akasa Ecliple 62. At the monent I don't use any hard drive cages. My solitary internal drive is housed in a Vantec Vortex HD 5.25" cooler which has performed flawlessly for years with its superior cross flow fan.

Jumping to 3 drives means that can't remain, but adding them all to a drive bay cage in the case will cripple my main source of intake cooling (120mm lower front fan).

So instead I can free up 2x 5.25" drive bays and use a 3 drive caddy which most I've seen come with 80mm cooling fans.

So far I've looked at: Icy Dock models, with the MB235SPF-1B topping the list,



and the Norco SNT-2131 which is sold under a different brand name here in the UK,
http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail....elno=snt-2131#



A review seems to knock the Norco for the poorly layed out rear PCB & fan compromising cooling but then again the Icy Dock has a similar arrangement (PCB parallel to fan at rear). I don't wan't to compromise cooling and on the one hand these caddies are designed for this amount of use\heat right? On the other hand I would probably fit my own 80mm fan and run it off my fan controller but would it be better to direct the fan onto the PCB or away from it? Both of these seem to favour away from the PCB.

Open to all suggestions\recommendations\user experiences of these caddies.

Sorry for the long post but want to get my purchase right. SSD's are still out of the question for me at the moment due to price per GB.