ICY DOCK

Icy Dock’s Black Vortex adds 4 hot-swap hard drives to the

front of your PC

The optical drive is not something you really need much anymore in a desktop PC. Ultrabooks and anything with an Apple logo on it have ditched the drives completely. Midi and full desktop cases, however, still typically come with several front-accessible 5.25-inch bays. Even if you do have a DVD writer or Blu-ray drive, there’s still a lot of empty bays left.

Icy Dock, a company that specializes in storage enclosures, has come up with a way to put those spare drive bays to use. The answer? A modular hot-swap hard drive cage called the Black Vortex.

The latest version of the cage can hold up to four 3.5-inch SATA hard drives and comes complete with a 120mm LED-lit fan on the front for cooling as well as a dust filter. It fits into the space taken up by three 5.25-inch drive bays, and has both fan speed control and individual hard drive power toggling. The cage is powered by two 15-pin SATA power connections making it easy to hook up to most modern PCs.

While the Black Vortex certainly counts as a niche product, the fact you can now insert up to an additional 6TB of storage in the front of an existing desktop PC case, complete with its own cooling solution, is pretty cool. Making the hard drives hot swappable also means you can handle a lot more than just four extra hard drives.

The price of the cage isn’t too bad, either. I’ve only found it listed on one online store so far for $86.50, but that’s sure to come down once the larger e-tailers receive stock. And as it fits into standard 5.25-inch bays and relies on SATA connectors, it’s going to be transferable between systems when you inevitably replace your PC in years to come.