A tale of three SATA caddies

I'm a fan of removable SATA tray caddies for backup. These caddies slide into a special 5.25inch drive tray and being SATA, they can be hot swapped too (though getting the hot swap to work on some controllers, notably certain nForce models, can be quite challenging). Yes, you can just use external USB or even ESATA drives, but ESATA isn't particularly widespread and the caddies have several advantages over USB drives:-

• They can use inexpensive 3.5 inch SATA hard drives without needing an external power supply, since the caddy tray provides power from the computers power supply.
• They fit inside the computer, therefore they do not clutter up your desk or position themselves somewhere where they can easily be knocked or accidentally disconnected during a backup.
• Because they are SATA, data transfer rates are higher, this is a major plus for bigger backups.

Until recently, I'd been purchasing my caddies from E-Buyer, a popular supplier of IT equipment here in the UK. The caddies were branded as "Plexus". Somewhat inconveniently, it's not possible to buy a caddy without buying the tray part (the bit that fits inside the 5.25 drive bay), however, at £4.59 plus shipping for both components, it was hard to care about the pile of unused trays.

Unfortunately however, E-Buyer suddenly stopped supplying the Plexus caddies altogether. This left me in something of a dilemma, at least USB and ESATA are standard parts, a Plexus SATA tray caddy is not. I'd invested in several of these drives for backup and data storage, so I set out looking for a compatible alternative.

Comparing pictures available on the internet yielded some interesting results. Caddies supplied by Lindy Electronics and by Pluscom looked strangely familiar, even down to the zig zag pattern on the side of the tray. I decided this warranted further investigation so I ordered a caddy from Lindy and a friend who had also adopted the caddy system ordered one of the Pluscom models.

Comparing the three, they do look very similar. There are some notable differences however:-

The (apparently discontinued) Plexus caddies have a ribbon cable to connect the SATA and power cables to the drive, whereas the other caddies simply have a connector that the drive must slide onto. This means that the Plexus caddies can accommodate non standard SATA drives including 2.5 inch drives. This is very convenient if you ever repair computers and need to inspect hard drives in another machine. However, since the physical dimensions of the caddy are designed for 3.5inch drives, a 2.5inch drive cannot be screwed in place so you probably wouldn't want to do this as a permanent solution.

The Lindy caddy has a different style of handle, but is otherwise identical, apart from the price which is as much as 4 times higher.

The Pluscom caddies are the most different. There's an extra plastic guide rail on the side of the caddy. The Pluscom tray has been redesigned slightly to use this. What this means is that the Pluscom trays are unable to accept the Lindy or Plexus caddies, but the Pluscom caddies fit just fine in the Lindy or Plexus trays.

From my observations, it seems like the caddies are all manufactured at the same factory, with minor modifications according to each resellers spec. Funnily enough, the best caddies (the Plexus ones) also proved to be the cheapest.