Aluminum Dual Bay 10Gbps Hard Drive Enclosure with Cooling Fan for 2.5“/3.5" SATA HDD/SSD with USB A/C 3.2 Gen 2, Support Hot Swappable, Daisy Chain Expansion, Tool-Free, DAS(NO RAID/NAS)

This enclosure has been working very well for me and I would recommend it to anyone looking to build a small DIY storage/server solution -- if you are moderately tech savvy. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a small storage server, with this unit connected via USB-C. 4x2TB SSDs in a software RAID5 configuration. Running Samba, Plex, PiHole, and WireGuard. Transfer speeds are very acceptable, given the unit price, SSDs I'm using, and the server configuration. Burst transfers over Samba are ~100MB/s with a sustained rate of ~80MB/s. Things to be aware of:1. The fans are surprisingly loud. I filled the bays with SSDs and felt comfortable unplugged the fan connector. Temps have been fine since the unit only gets moderate usage (mid 30s to upper 40s C). This would be a significant issue if HDDs or high usage were required, but works well for my situation.2. Somewhere between the Pi, this unit, or the software, something doesn't implement UASP well. I'm *guessing* it's the disk controller chip of this unit and I'm *guessing* it's the cause of other users data loss issues. I disabled UASP on my Pi and have had no issues whatsoever. I'm also pushing weekly backups to an off-server HDD, just in case.

The enclosure works well so far. Install was easy, it's been running reliably for a month now, and speeds are good. I've run into two things that could be issues for some people1: the included power supply doesn't give enough power to spin up all 6 disks. From a cold start, I have to pull one disc out, let it power the rest up, then insert the 6th. Not that big of an issue for my usage, as I keep it on for the most part, but a minor annoyance.2: The fans are not particularly quiet. It's in a networking closet for me, so it's not an issue, but it may not be the best fit for a desk in a workspace.

This is a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) device which means you can plug it directly into a desktop or laptop and the computer will see each hard drive in this just like it would if you had installed it into the computer. Because this uses the fastest USB version (at the time I purchased anyway) the transfer rates are even faster than what my old computer was via internal SATA connections. Either way I'm using mine on a laptop with 4 drives for a Plex server and its working excellent and can load and play 4K files from the 7200 RPM drives I have it in which my other computer wasn't capable of doing and only worked correctly on SSD drives. The huge storage capability of this made it a no brainer for my plex server and because there are no screws required for the drives to be installed that was super easy.I was a bit concerned about the noise level that people had mentioned in other reviews. In my case I put this in my office where it stays on 24/7 and its no different than having my other computer running fan noise wise. So you can hear it running but its nothing I would call loud. If you prefer silence though it might be best to put it in a room you aren't in constantly or maybe in a further back area of the room not as close to you. But it is absolutely not loud, just a low fan noise and doesn't bother me at all and I sit about 5 feet away.Setting this up was about as easy as it could possibly be. I just connected it to power and to the laptop with USB-C, popped my drives (WITH DATA on them still) out of my old computer and put them into this enclosure with no tools required, slid the sleds back in one at a time and they started showing up on the computer within seconds. IF you buy a brand new drive do the same thing but then go to Disk Management and initialize the drive and assign drive letter/etc. and you'll be good to go in no time!

The fan is a bit noisy. It's running at full speed all the time. Also, on my unit, the red and blue light stay on constantly unless your accessing data off the drive then both lights flash. After the warranty. I will install a resistor to slow it down so it will make less noise. There's no thermal sensor built into this product. I'm knocking off two stars for this particular problem. As I have to modify it. It seems to be fast and I didn't have to reformat my hard drives. They already have data on them and mounted these drives without any issues. They were formatted from OS X, and it was able to read these drives without corruption. It would've been nice if the red lights would just come on if there were particular errors or problems with the hard drives. There is no smart information coming from the controller. I have to use DriveDX for OS X in order to read the conditions of the hard drive. I used 4 Western digital reds 10 TB Drives.Update!The company reached out to me and offered me a refund. They apologized for my experience and the unit that I had purchased. I really appreciate the quick response and the refund. A+ personal care thank you. Changing my three stars to four.Update: 5/14/2025One month later, I am no longer using this unit as it is too loud. I purchased another unit (IO CREST) with eight Bay capacity with the thermal sensor for the fan.

I've been testing this enclosure for over a week now with TrueNAS Community Edition. Here is some information you might be looking for (I know I was). The enclosure seems to support full SMART capabilities, so if you are planning on setting up a ZFS based pool, it's the right item. It's also pretty silent, despite what some other people say. You plug it in and it just works. Keeps HDD temperature in range max 30C. So far I've been testing it with 2x spinning HDD (1TB each) in mirror configuration. When I move to my full 6x HDD zraid2 I will update the post with speed and more details if necessary.