I’d take the 8 x M.2 or the 24 x 2.5" SATA bays to start new experimentation with building DIY Thunderbolt-connected disk shelves.
Early draft:
Why?
Either of them would be awesome to have - the 24-bay would be great for re-purposing my current gaming rig into another storage server with my dream of all-flash storage. But the optical/SSD backplane would be a great addition to my gaming PC so I could still run old games off of discs and pop in some additional SSDs for storage.
In any case - pun intended - good luck to all! Glad to finally be part of the forums.
Hi Wendell, if you still have the ToughArmor 4 x 2.5" NVMe U.2 adapter, I would love to use it with my 4 x 7680GB Ultrastar DC SN630 NVME SSDs 
Basically I want to use them to build a small but fast TrueNAS Scale system with 20Gbe connection via thunderbolt (It’s crazy but thunderbolt works on TrueNAS scale!) and eventually upgrade to 25Gbe switch.
I would love the unit that can be set up to be a dual sata and optical drive. I have an extensive dvd collection. I would be able to transfer movies from on pc to any of my other pcs in the house QUICKLY with the sata port. I would have to remove my optical drive and replace it with a laptop optical drive. I call this machine the ripper lol. I have been using this million-year-old HAF case but it still does the job well. It is really underpowered I am still using the 3 core AMD in it with 32 gigs of DDR3. I have a 3 other machines one with a 2700x, one with a 3900x and my newest has a 5600 in it
I would use either or, but the IcyDock 2x2.5 to 5.25" adapter would work great with my objective to convert all of my family’s old video tapes into a digital library of home video. I may also end up doing the same for a DVD library (a-la Wendell’s approach 
) so the 24 bay one could service that need as well.
Thanks as always for making great tutorial videos, they’ve been invaluable with this project!
I’m more interested in the 24 bay monster, MB924IP-B 24 x 2.5. I have a file server that has a bunch of spinning rust for bulk storage and some ssd’s for OS images on a proxmox pool. I use it for all my family’s documents and video/pictures as well as a plex server, home automation, and various game servers. I’ve already decided that my investments in hdd’s are done and in the future even the bulk storage will move to ssd’s which this would be absolutely excellent for.
My current setup with a small 6 drive icy dock which is in the middle of some reworking.
The MB602SPO-B 2 x 2.5" its really cool, i would change the extra hdd cage with it in my HAF Evo and finally get use of my old laptop dvd drive
Maybe even a bluray drive but i read that there is a fw block for reading 4k video disc so maybe not worth it
I’ll build a TrueNAS box. I plan with 8 2TB SSDs. Likely adding more vdevs in the future. The 24 bay monster is a bit overkill for me, but more useful than the 2-way combo thing. 16 would be great.
I’d be interested in the 24 bay monster 2.5" adapter for my Unraid server to add some more Flash based disk pools for VM’s and Dockers so I can segregate them more to avoid one disk failure affecting too many things while I rebuild.
I would love the 24x2.5" Icy Dock to stick into one of my full towers and add some LSI raid Controller to create a much larger SSD based NAS for my house. Currently most of my home servers run off a bunch of old mechanical HDDs. Which are decent for backup storage, but I’d love enough SSD storage for Game Servers, Plex, and some other services.
HI,
I think the IcyDock 2x2.5 to 5.25" adapter would be useful in my PC for data recovery jobs. Having a ODD there could be useful for that purpose and being able to plug SATA drives in directly would be useful 
I would have to by a new PC case. Oh well, these issues are sent to be solved 
KInd Regards
Simon Zerafa
Bulding first home lab and would love to start with some sweet gear. I already have 20 ssds to populate them with.
Oh wow, is that a disk reader + 2x2.5" bays? Now that’s cool. 
Would probably have to do a custom case build/mod to accommodate such a thing tho…
I’d like to use this to be able to use smaller SSD drives on my TrueNAS Scale node, which only has 2 bays for 2.5in and currently running k8s storage on spinning rust. Adding a optical drive for “playing” DVDs would be awesome too! I would put the drives in the case loosely or velcroed, but alas, there’s no room.
Here are my 2x 2.5in bays:
The 24 x 2.5 would find a good home in my Unraid Server using an old Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 chassis. As you can see it currently already has an IcyBox MB322SP-B (with only two slots) which I need to extend.
I would use the 24 bay monster to upgrade my old yet rock solid FreeNas server, which uses an equally old 5x3.5 in 3x5.25 hot-swap cage.
I would use the 2x2.5 + ODD to upgrade my offsite backup NAS.
The 24x2.5" would be the perfect thing I would need to get my original plan back in order. I have a Thermaltake Core X5 that used to have a 2nd gen Threadripper in it(bought it before everything went overpriced). With the shortages of products, I can’t seem to get this like that cage in Canada. In the meantime, I have been using cheap 5.25 to 2 SSD adapters from Amazon. Not really ideal but it’s been working. I would have to paint it white as the case is white but I bet it would look amazing, almost factory-like in that case.
Anyway thanks for letting us have a chance at hardware, like this, which we couldn’t afford to buy at today’s prices.
I wonder what the designer thought who put the USB and audio connections onto the bottom of the case 
I’ve got an old CM Stacker full tower case with 10 5.25 bays that i want to build up as a media server. need to get away from the QNAP setup i’m currently running given their constant security issues. I’d use both
