A picture is worth a thousand words:

As you can see, my BTV server is on a shelf in my unfinished basement, about five-and-a-half feet off the floor, tucked into a corner with about a dozen attachments connected to various ports in the back. On top of that, my server is housed in a rather cranky Enlight chassis from the late 90's, which was manufactured before rolling metal edges and "tool-less installation" were standard features. Blood is shed nearly every time I yank the cover off this miserable thing, and I've never re-assembled the chassis in less than ten minutes of pushing, pulling, tugging and cursing.

I decided it was time to make things easy on myself, and I began searching for some front-loading drive bays of reasonable quality that didn't cost too much. After a bit of research, I decided to try these SATA trays:

I ordered these from Newegg, based primarily on the customer feedback comments and price point -- about $20 each. Once I got to inspect them closely, I was impressed with the sturdiness of the unit: both the drive carrier and tray are made of aluminum, and the front of both is a black, powdercoated metal finish. The only plastic part on the entire unit is the carrier handle itself. Packaged with the carrier and tray are a single red SATA cable, a 3-pin lead for the HDD activity light (not actually required with SATA drives), a bag of screws including low-profile screws for securing the disk to the carrier, and a pair of keys for locking the carrier into the tray.

Taking a closer look: above on the left is the PCB in the back of the tray, with SATA data and power connectors visible at the bottom; these connectors are directly aligned with the SATA connectors on the carrier, pictured on the right. Notice the 4-pin molex power connector, available for systems with older power supplies that don't have SATA power hookups. There is also a toggle switch for specifying whether the mounted drive is SATA1 or SATA2, which enables the proper operation of the disk activity LED on the front of the carrier (pictured below left).

The front left side of the carrier has power (green) and disk activity (amber) LEDs, while the integrated disk lock is on the right side. The integrated 40mm cooling fan is mounted in the center of the front of the carrier (above right); it pulls air through the front of the housing, drawing it over the carrier containing the disk. This active cooling measure looks like it might lower the disk's operating temperature, but I was anxious to see how well it worked in practice.

One nicely implemented feature of the carrier is the spring-loaded "flap" door, which in its neutral position closes off the opening on the front of the drive bay, dropping down flat when the carrier is loaded into the tray:

So it's time to install the disk drive into the carrier. The carrier cover is secured with a single screw in one rear corner, setup such that backing the screw out actually cinches the cover against the carrier slots, while tightening the screw loosens the cover. Once the cover is removed, the drive can be set into the carrier and secured to the bottom with the provided flathead, low-profile screws (below right), which ensure the screwheads don't hang up when the carrier is loaded into the tray.

Once the drive is mounted into the carrier, the tray itself needs to be installed into an available 5.25" external bay on the machine. Installation is straightforward, and very reminiscent of installing an optical drive (DVD) of the same dimensions, down to securing it to the external drive cage with the "screws-in-slots" method.

On the left, you can see that the upper tray has a drive carrier installed, while the lower tray is empty, with the carrier opening covered by the metal flap. When loading the drive carrier into the tray, the carrier handle is kept in the 'up' position until the carrier is a half-inch shy of being flush with the tray, then cinched down into position to completely seat the SATA power and data connectors. The carrier must also be locked into the tray using the included key (pictured) in order for the drive to power up on boot.