4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure,Yottamaster Aluminum USB3.0 4 Bay 3.5"/2.5" External Hard Drive Enclosure,4 Bay HDD Enclosure for Home and Office Windows/Mac/Linux - [FS4U3]

Straight out of the box, this HDD enclosure/NAS drive is extremely easy to set up and configure. The default setting is what they call 'normal' which lets you access each disk individually (in any combination up to five 18Tb SSD/HDDs). You also have the option of using it as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or spanning them (effectively creating one huge storage device) or setting it up as a RAID drive (RAID 0, 1, 3, 5 or 10 are all available if you have enough drives), using the flip switches on the rear of the unit.This unit uses a USB 3.0 connection so you are 'limited' to 5Gbps. You can use Solid State Drives or more traditional Hard Disk Drives in either 3.5" or 2.5" configurations. The sleds come with all the attachment screws (both 2.5" and 3.5" threads) you could possibly need (and a free screwdriver if you need it) for installing your drives securely.The software available from the Yottamaster website is easy to find and install, though I would prefer that they actually make a clear link available for it! One great feature is the ability to see what resources are available to you if you change your RAID settings (what is used/what is unavailable on certain disks) To explain this, if, for example, I had three 2Tb HDDs and one 4Tb HDDs and I wanted to use them all in a RAID 10 configuration, the 4Tb HDD would only use 2Tb, with the rest being unavailable (far from ideal).The only drawback I have found in this item is that it isn't clearly identified in your System Resources. I think this would really help people trouble shoot. That said, if you keep to the basic setting, you can easily identify and use each of the disks you've installed.The set up takes less than 2 minutes (mainly the time it takes to screw in the disks!), and you're ready to go.This is ideal for anyone needing a fairly good, basic enclosure or NAS.

Commissioned this unit with a couple of IronWolf drives on 9th August. Drive reported inaccessible less than six days later.Looking through the logs there were a few IO errors and a couple of USBASP device resets. Investigating the drive appearing to the OS, it is reported as unformatted - probably as a result of the MBRs being corrupted.I pulled the drives out of the enclosure and tested each with HDDUtility, no errors reported. So the drive errors are due to the enclosure and how it internally accesses the drive.The reason we buy a RAID1 device is for data security. Well there is no security in this device - I cannot trust it to store data, and this is the reason it gets one star. I have other RAID1 devices in operation for 6+ years, on one I've had to replace a failed drive but that's to be expected. But never have I lost everything - poof! and it's gone - let alone in six days. Fortunately the data was only backups so no harm done, but imagine if you had put all of your precious data on the unit for this to happen?Yottamaster support is pretty much non-existent. I gave up trying to figure out how to use the supplied software to check for firmware updates - nothing I did with anything supplied worked at all, and I suspect that the poor documentation should have mentioned that this device does not use the supplied firmware or software available for download on the Yotamaster site.I posted a message to them with technical details and a request for support but I'm not keeping the unit under any circumstances and don't expect a meaningful response from them. If I do then I'll update the review.A small extra annoyance - the power button was missing when I unpackaged it. I looked high an low for it without knowing what it looked like. I found it a day later on the floor and replaced it - the thing is loose and I taped it in place. Not a good start, but vastly overshadowed by the failire a few days later.

Pretty much everything about this unit feels solid. Drives must be screwed into each caddy, but that's easy enough and adds to the quality feel. Works well under Windows - drives are visible in Disk Manager and speeds are roughly 140 MB/s.The firmware has a BIG negative however, hence the 2 stars, in that only ONE drive can report SMART data for health monitoring. Other caddies, like the Orico allows all drives to report. Tried several SMART tools like Hard Disk Sentinel (see pic), Disk Info, etc., none can access all the drives. This kind of monitoring is essential to predict upcoming disk failures and help prevent data loss, and if this could be changed by Yottamaster, then I wouldn't hesitate to give this product more stars. If a firmware update changes this in the future, I will update this review!Update: Although Yottamaster couldn't assist with a firmware update, the developer of Hard Disk Sentinel has created a version that works for this enclosure. Using Hard Disk Sentinel, I can now monitor all my drives SMART attributes and be informed of possible future failures. So highly recommend using this tool, if you need this monitoring.

This is a great bit of kit, extremely well constructed, works very well once set up and is quite and power efficient. However it is not intuitive to set up, I have several NAS boxes so familiar with setting up raid volumes but this works differently. You will have to read the instructions FIRST, and you will have to read them several times as they are not well written or clear, and ensure you follow the steps for formatting. If you are installing new drives or drives that have been in a Linux based NAS you will have to format them for FAT or NTFS first using a drive toaster or similar, at least I think this is the case, at least it this is the solution that worked for me having failed to format the drives in the Yottamaster box. Having got it set up, I am very impressed, it is fast, quiet and just works as a raid5 external disk.