The Tray
The tray itself is barely larger than a 3 1/2" drive. Installation of the drive is pretty simple. You take your run-of-the-mill 1/2 height 3 1/2"
hard drive and place it in the tray, connect the 40-pin IDE cable and the power to the hard drive, screw him in and put the cover back on. That's all
there is to it. You can see the little handle in the pictures. Keep in mind that the little door in the front of the drive is actually removable, so
you can use a ZIP/LS120 or any other kind of IDE device that fits into a 3 1/2" bay, not just a hard drive.
There are other manufacturers that produce these things, some are hot-swappable, some are not, so consider yourself warned. Do your homework before
you decide to get into this thing. The module itself is pretty simple. It has a small fan in the back that sucks air into your case and away from
the hard drive, so you might want to keep that in mind if you're a ventilation freak. The fan is reversible, and is connected to the module by a
small 2 pin lead, so you can reverse it if your in-case temperature is low or if you don't want the fan disrupting airflow inside your case. It's
a small fan, though, probably 20-30CFM, so I wouldn't worry about it.
The module has 2 rows of 3 pins in the back (6 pins total for those mathematically challenged) for set-up. The module can be set to either be bootable
or hot-swappable, but not both (for obvious reasons). You can use the hot-swappable capabilities to change "storage" hard drives on the fly without
having to reboot, or you can use the bootable capabilities to swap hard drives containing different operating systems. The pins in the module can
probably be moved without taking the module out of the case, but with great difficulty. Keep that in mind if you're thinking you're going to be moving
between boot/hot-swappable modes a lot.
One more positive about the module is that there is no real limit to how many you can have in your machine. The only downside is that each one eats
up a 5 1/4" bay and a spot on your IDE chain.
