5 Bay RAID HDD Enclosure

I have had this enclosure for about a year and its a decent raid enclosure. Holds five 3.5 or 2.5 inch drives. I don’t remember all of the raid settings but I am using it as JBOD photos on 1 drive, music on another, etc and 1 drive backing up an iMac. So far so good except I couldn’t get it to work at first, it turned out the usb 3.0 cable was bad. Works great since I figured that out. The housin is aluminum with dark tinted plastic window on one side so you can see the blue lights on each port on the backplane. Shaped like a little MacPro. Raid is set with dip switches on the Back. I just wish it had thunderbolt. Has a cooling fan but I swapped it for a quiet Noctura fan, it would be totally quiet if it were filled with SATA SSD drives.

I bought this enclosure because it looks what you'd get if Apple's last generation of Mac Pro had a love child with a custom built PC. I bought the 5 bay version of this enclosure that has built-in RAID capabilities. It's worth noting that the four bay version is just an enclosure, although you could easily be set it up as RAID using Windows storage spaces, which is what I ultimately did with this one anyway (read on to see why). Taking it out of the box it looks and feels really premium and the RGB lighting adds a great touch when you power it up. It's truly unique in the external enclosure world and sure to please Mac fans and Custom PC enthusiasts alike. I'm personally a custom PC builder and got this for storing all of the massive photo and video files I capture with my Sony A7rIV and A7riii. Some people have said that the fan on this unit is really loud. As someone who's been building PC's for years and knows what to expect from different fans running at different speeds, I'd say it's about what I'd expect from a tiny 80mm fan running at full force. For those curious to know, the fan itself uses a proprietary two-pin connector, is not PWM, and doesn't scale based on temperature. As far as noise from the unit goes, I did find that the acrylic panels have no padding between them and the aluminum chassis of the case. Under heavy reading/writing tasks, these rattle and can get pretty loud. This may be what some people were attributing to the fan. A tiny bead of silicone at the center of each panel between the screws will remedy this issue. Hopefully Yottamaster will add another set of screws at the center of the panel or add some padding to prevent this in future iterations of their design. If you do open the case, be aware that there are two metal brackets that float at either side of the unit which can pretty easily scratch the soft acrylic panel. You can press them in carefully or put something between them and the glass to prevent this or the top of the unit first (this method is much more involved). Another challenge I encountered out of box was the sleep timer which caused the unit to shut down at random - even during read/write tasks. To resolve this, I disabled drive sleep in Windows power plan, and downloaded two pieces of software from the Yottamaster website. One of these simply allows you to flash new settings to the unit's firmware, the second is full fledges software that let's you manage arrays and tweak various other settings on the device. I found that setting sleep to "0" (0=don't sleep) on one did not change the setting on the other. In order to keep the enclosure from powering down constantly, I found that both had to be set to "0." One other oddity that I noticed in the software is that the drive numbers displayed there don't match the ones physically printed on the side of the drive bays on the device. So, for example, drive 1 on the device displays as drive 5 on the software. I'm not sure if mine was miswired or if the software simply needs to be reprogrammed to accurately reflect the correct physical bay number. I setup a RAID 10 array with the built-in switch based utility then set the enclosure to standard mode and used Windows storage spaces to create a RAID 10 configuration. I ran speed tests in both configurations and found that I got significantly faster read and write speeds (about 20/40mbps) by allowing Windows to manage the RAID setup versus using the built-in RAID management on the unit. ===PROS=== -Probably the best looking RAID enclosure on the market right now -Solid and well constructed -RGB fan and tinted acrylic panels add a nice aesthetic touch to the unit -After some tweaking it has been functioning flawlessly for several weeks ===CONS=== -Fan uses a proprietary 2-pin connector -Acrylic panels can vibrate against the chassis under heavy loads, causing additional noise -Out of box you need to download software to keep it from going to sleep every 5 minutes -Drive numbers displayed software side do not match numbers printed on the physical device

Amazing value for the money and worked. Worked right out of the box. Been using for the last 6 months almost with moderate load during the evenings and so far no issues.

Update: Purchased a second device Aug 28, 2022. By Dec 16, 2022 is was failing regardless of the PC that was running it (3 machines here). There is no way to troubleshoot the unit itself and the documentation is useless. Since we cannot afford to lose our RAID arrays, we will have to purchase two new units made by someone else. Utter junk. Original Review: I purchased this device because of its storage capability vs. price point. It's loaded with 5 10TB drives and works very well. The practical issues/everyday issues are: 1. A cold-start or reboot of the PC requires one to cycle the power on the device. It cannot auto-mount if the power goes off or the PC goes down. 2. The clear plexiglass sides rattle. Support acts like you're the first person to encounter this, and put me through a long, slow burn of email exchanges ending with my giving up. I used the silicone-bead fix that someone else posted here. 3. NOISY. Absurdly so, and no way to slow the fan to make it less so. My workstations were built for quiet. 4. The light is always on, as long as the device is on. No way to shut it off. My workstations run 24/7 and the lights are bright at night. So, if you can get past those items, you're good to go. Again, for the price point, you can't beat the storage capability and day-to-day reliability. But poor secondary design decisions compromised what could have been a 5-star product.

Used with five 8Tb hard drives which formatted out to about 30Tb of usable space. I did have a problem with coping files from a 4 bay USB external drive to this raid array that one of them would time out and go off line. Coping the files first to my C drive then to the raid array solved that and the copy process went smoothly. I'm still in the process of getting all my files onto this raid array but so far all is working great even with the copy process taking 8 hours and longer from my C drive to this raid array. Copy speeds are good with about 150Mb compared to my other external single drives that copy at 100Mb or less speed. This is what windows report as copy speeds.

Let me start by confirming that the excessive noise reported by other buyers is REAL. The original 80mm fan with RGB LEDs (QSCD model 8025S) is VERY noisy. So I did myself a long-term favor, and I replaced it with a Noctua NF-A8 ULN premium fan: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00NEMGCRQ/ Night and day! The noise is gone. True that I also gave up the fancy RGB lights the original fan had, but the location of my enclosure is out of sight, and who cares, anyway! It's easy to remove the back cover (7 screws) to access the fan (see 1st photo). Noctua has a standard 3 pin connector, with yellow, red, and black wires. Make sure the black wire is connected to the bottom pin on the board (see 2nd photo). The yellow wire has no function. Leaving it disconnected makes the fan go full speed. The original fan has 1,500 rpm, Noctua has 1,400, so there is no real issue. One may even try to make it even quieter, with the low noise connector, which will reduce its speed to 1,100 rpm, but there is no need to try this. Make sure the air flows from inside out, in order words the writing on the fan must be against the cover (check 1st photo again. Otherwise, the USB cable and power cable are really too short forcing you either to buy longer ones or to keep the rack adjacent to your computer. I suppose the vendor could spend a few dollars more to offer a product with a decent cable length to eliminate some customer frustration. I am using it in a RAID 5 configuration with 5 x 4TB HGST Enterprise-grade HDDs, to get a total of ~15TB fast and safe storage. Even if the system can still function in case 1 HDD fails, don't forget to get a 6th HDD of the same type, as a spare part. Better safe than sorry.

Easy to insert and remove hhds. Small and compact without compromising on durability. Love the handles- makes it easier to transport the device. Fan is not as loud as other comments make it out to be. Its pretty quiet (low ambient noise) - I can basically fall asleep to it.

It should be more clear in the description that the array will be capped at 250MBps Read and @ 250MBps write, no matter what raid mode you choose. even if there is no read or write happening the extra bandwidth is reserved. So for 4K video editing this is a No go. for the price the unit should be upgraded to USB 3.1 gen 2 at the very least . I looks great, somewhat noisy, and only fast enough to be a Backup drive array. I wouldn't even consider it a gaming drive as advertised , maybe 15 years ago.