[wsume99]

I think the Cooler Masters are a great value at half the price (at worst) of the cheapest 5 in 3 hot swap backplates. The provide a quiet 120mm fan, a filter, vibration protection, and better storage density than traditional 1 to 1s.

For storage density nothing beats a 5 in 3 backplate though, and if you are willing to pay they are the only way to maximize storage density in tower cases.

With that said, Unraid does not support hot swap and hopefully you will not be swapping HDs often once they are in the array so its basically a trade-off between the small amounts of PITA when you put in a HD every time (I can do it in 5 minutes) vs. the huge PITA the one night you have to break off all the little tabs in a case for the backplate to fit. Unless you buy one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6811219033

And then, well....

All good points. I primarily wanted to highlight the fact that you have to remove the entire cage to replace or add a new HDD. I noticed that nobody had mentioned that issue. I too thought that once I got my array up and running that I would not be moving my drives around but that has not been the fact. I seem to go through brief periods of disk swapping activity from time to time and when it happens I always wish I had the 5-in-3 hot swap enclosures. Plus, is it likely that a user is going to add a new drive cage fully populated with disks? I say no. A more likely scenario is that they would add to their array one drive at a time which means repeated removals and installs of the entire cage. Granted unRAID does not support hot swapping but the disk accessibility provided by the hot swap enclosures is definitely a big plus. However one should also not overlook the fact that the hot swap enclosure is more complicated thus is more susceptible to failure as well. The bottom line is that I just wanted to add some more info to the discussion so that people are more aware of what is being recommended. Purchase price is not the only contributor to value.