OK, so this blog entry isn’t about memory so much as it’s about a cool ancillary product that you’ll want to look at—the Icy Dock MB994SP-4S 4 in 1 SAS / SATA Hot Swap Backplane RAID cage. This neat little example of metal bending allows you to cram four 2.5-inch drives (SSDs, for example) into one 5.25-inch drive bay. The dock comes with four little metal carriers for 2.5-inch drives and each drive bolts into a carrier using the drive’s four bottom-screw holes. The carriers then snap into the bay. Side-to-side space is at a premium, so Icy Dock devised carriers with zero side clearance; The carriers are no wider than the 2.5-inch drive.

You’ll find two power connectors, four drive data connectors (SAS or SATA), and two fans on the bay’s back panel. The bay senses when drives are present and only switches on a fan if it has one or two drives to cool. Because the bay brings each of the four drives’ data connectors out separately (no multiplexing) you can use the cage as a RAID bay or simply to house four independent 2.5-inch drives in an otherwise unused 5.25-inch drive slot. The bay with four drive carriers currently sells for slightly more than $50 at NewEgg.

Here’s a very short video to illustrate the concept.