4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with Cooling Fan for 2.5/3.5" SATA HDD/SSD with USB A/C 3.0＋eSATA Cable, 3.5 Hard Drive Reader Supports 80TB Capacity(NO RAID/NAS)

I am in the process of replacing my old desktop PCs (one for Linux, another for windows) and file servers (Linux/NFS/Samba) and I needed someplace to put the SSDs and hard drives in the server so I can get rid of the old behemoths that take up too much space, use too much power, generate too much heat and are, frankly, getting old enough where they don't do what I need them too, expecially in terms of connectivity. The storage in the old server was all internal, and mostly 3.5-inch hard drives. I had bought a small enclosure that does hardware RAID, and connects to the server with USB 3. Unfortunately, it was really intended for use with Macs and although my newer Windows PC would work with it, the old Linux boxes just wouldn't see the drives in it as bare drives, and wouldn't see the RAID array at all. With the new server, it still won't see the RAID or eve JBOD, but would see the drives with it set up for individual disks. Unfortunately when I configured a Linux software RAID one of the drives would show an error and the RAID software would take it off line even though no SMART errors were being logged. The drives worked fine in another enclosure. I am still working with the vendor to provide a solution, but in the meantime I bought one of these. It does not do RAID (I am quite happy with Linux software RAID) but Linux reliably sees the four drives and I configured two RAID1 arrays without a hitch, no problems and no errors.These enclosures are drop dead simple to use. No tools are required to install the drives and once powered up and connected to the server I see all four drives. If you want RAID, you do it in software (also easy on Linux) and you see however many RAID arrays you create (in my case I had two 2T and two 8T drives, so each pair was a RAID 1 array. If you had 4 drives the same size, you could do RAID 5 and get more out of your storage. The USB interface is surprisingly fast. The drive trays are plastic, but they don't go anywhere so that should be fine. They stay cool enough (the metal external case doesn't even feel warm) and the fan is effective without being noisy. The power supply is more than adequate for 4 drives, and really overkill if you are using SSDs or 2.5-inch drives. After the fight I had with the previous enclosure, I was thrilled to have zero issues with this one. I was impressed enough that I bought another for some additional drives that I have. With the mini-PC and two of these enclosures, the total size is less than a third of my old server, it's quieter, generates less heat, uses less power and it at least as fast. I ended up with effectively a home-built NAS for a fraction of the price, with no proprietary component (read "expensive"0 to worry about. What is not to like?

Works great but quite noisy

Wife essential need.

Useless and potentially damaging unit for several reasons. First of all the thermal design is ass. There is barely any room for airflow. I took the unit apart into its component parts and even cutting holes in the side and mounting 120mm fans won't help as the disks are almost completely encased in plastic. The rear fan is tiny and underdimensioned and the airflow holes in the backplabne are too small.I ran 4 4tb disks in the unit without any load for 6hrs and they reached 58C. In the end i removed the backplane and used when an open metal frame i put together. That kept them disks cooler however then i ran into issues with the usb interface. For ine the disks never spin down. Second i am still evalutaing of this is ausb ir power issue but the disks occasionally drop out letting to series corruption and possibly disk damage. The dishes become unreadable and loose all patriotic information. I am plugging then into my Unix system to check disk health because windows doesn't want to patriotic or format them.I will test the esata and see if it behaves better but to be honest just this system at your own peril. Without modification your disks WILL sure from heat related issues.Will update one i know more about the usb/esata.

This works great. The only gripe i have is that when you put your computer to sleep, the drives won’t spin down. Not recommended for conventional hard drives. SSD’s are fine.

great price works fast and efficiently for the price less than 100.00

Doesn't do what's advertised. Manufacturer claims this device is Windows, Mac, and Linux compatible, it's not. After texting with the manufacturer's support folks it was clear that they only understood windows operations. This was clear when the instructions indicated the drive had to be formatted first, clearly not true fow Linux. I'm returning it for the above reasons, I even inserted a windows formatted drive and my system wouldn't detect it.

Super easy setup. I had older 4TB drives from a western digital raid device that was not longer supported. Not wanting to loose the use of the drives, I bought this drive dock. Works great. No bothersome software. Each drive has its own drive letter.