Hey there ICY DOCK fans! Just wanted to let everyone know that I received my prize, and even though I already own several FlexFit Trios I already plan on putting this one to good use!
Here's an example of what I did with one of my my recent FlexFit Trio purchases: This an older Dell Optiplex 745 DT form factor machine, with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor inside of it and 4GB of DDR2-800 memory (soon to be 8GB total). Right now the enclosure is meant to be small so that it can easily fit on a desktop underneath a computer monitor, but I've re-purposed this old machine as a server to run Windows Home Server 2011 that's lower powered and can be accessed by any computer in the house to back up every computer's sensitive data that we could not afford to lose. I removed the optical drive and replaced it with the ICY DOCK FlexFit Trio, and inside of the adapter I was able to put a single 2TB 7200rpm HGST 3.5 inch hard drive, and in the two 2.5 inch slots I inserted dual Toshiba 500GB 2.5 inch 5400rpm drives...and all of this fit inside the single space that a single DVD drive used to reside in. Here's a high quality picture that shows my latest setup.
If you'll notice, I used the previous DVD drive's SATA and power cables to power the 2TB hard drive, and I inserted a SATA PCI card with two internal SATA II connectors to connect to the dual 500GB hard drives. I had a spare adapter that splits one 4-pin Molex connector into two SATA power connectors which I used to power the laptop drives. With all three drives I've inserted in the adapter I was able to take the face plate off of the back of the kit and slide it in the front to cover up the ugly 3.5 inch hard drive from being seen from the front, and now the Dell looks just like a standard desktop with a blank face plate installed.
WHS 2011 was easily installed from a USB flash drive to load the operating system on to the pre-existing 500GB hard drive that sits in the stock hard drive location, and am able to use the original 500GB hard drive, the second 2TB hard drive in the FlexFit Trio, and two additional 500GB laptop hard drives as storage spaces for backing up each computer's contents over wired ethernet (or WiFi with the case of laptops) overnight so that we always have at least one copy of our precious data in the event of dead hard drive. The adapter allows me to cram a grand total of 3.5 TB of data into a single machine that I can easily slide underneath my network hardware and helps me backup everything I can't live without, and i don't even have to remember it's even there in the first place because WHS 2011 automatically does everything for me in the background (but it typically tries to make images of each computer overnight or during periods of computer non-usage so it doesn't slow your computer down while you use it).
The second FlexFit Trio I have right now in use actually just holds an external card reader so that I can easily plug in CompactFlash, SD, and micro SD cards into the computer, but it gives me two spaces for 2.5 inch drives...and one of those spaces is about to be occupied by a brand new SanDisk SSD! My current case for that setup had no internal mount points to install an SSD inside of the case but the FlexFit Trio lets me slide the SSD in without any tools necessary. I might try to sneak in and take a picture or two of the setup once it's installed too.
Thanks once again to the amazing ICY DOCK team for this gift, as it will definitely be used in the future...I can guarantee it!