CENMATE Aluminum 4 Bay Hard Drive RAID 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, 8 RAID Modes, DAS(NO NAS)

I've ordered 4 of these now and 3 of them have been tested and here are the findings. 1.) No issues with 20TB shucked WD Easystore drives from Bestbuy. 2.) Fan is a little loud but honestly you need to keep your drives cool this is an acceptable compromise. 3.) The fan should be much larger if anything even mounted outside. Have not attempted a teardown to see if I can upgrade the fansize or change anything yet as it runs fine. 4.) Raid 5 with 4 20TB WD drives clocks at 150 MBps which is more than good enough for a media server. The RAID selection is like this: Switching between any raids and wiping out the data on the drives there is a "Normal" mode and then the other modes such as RAID 0 1 3 5... 1.) Default Normal Mode You get the box, you put the drives in and if you leave it in the default normal mode the drives will all mount normally as 4 drives. If you use ESATA you will need a port multiplier compatible card. 2.) RAID 5 You turn off the device set the dip switch to RAID 5 then hold the reset button for 10 seconds before letting go, the drives will auto be formatted to RAID 5 config and a header will be written on to the drives for this mode. 3.) Switching from RAID 5 to any other mode you need to go back to normal mode so it can erase the RAID headers on the drives. [BUG with Hard Disk Sentinel Pro] Now for the longest time I couldn't figure out why the drives won't mount properly it turns out once you've jumped to a RAID mode and go back to normal Hard Disk Sentinel Pro goes nuts and causes the drives to keep unmounting. You can manually erase each drive then all 4 will mount again. If you are just going to jump back to RAID 5 for example or another RAID level you can just ignore this weird problem and close Hard Disk Sentinel and all 4 drives should appear again in your diskpart manager. Couple of things I tested and figure I leave here so you don't have to guess: A.) If you leave the drives in while switching modes the drives will be wiped. B.) If you have two RAID sets and you wanna use the same enclosure and swap between the two sets, make sure you're already on the mode they are in before you put them in. So if you are going from normal to RAID 5 for example, LEAVE THE DRIVES OUT when switching modes or they'll get wiped. If this case is already in RAID 5 you can put in the drives before you turn them on, or push them in after you turn it on just make sure you put all drives in before it's ready. Failure to do this will cause a rebuild or a crashed RAID set. C.) The order doesn't matter. I rearranged the 4 drives so they were all in different slots, and it didn't affect the RAID working or the data on them. (WONDERFUL UPGRADE FROM PREVIOUS competitor box) So anyways yes you can buy 1 enclosure and swap multiple RAID sets of drives and leave other ones offline. Rebuild is automatic. If you have a failed drive just pop it out put another one in and the other 3 goes to work right away for RAID 5. Build quality overall is very basic, but the tool-less caddy design is a super quality of life upgrade if you plan to swap sets of disks. This case storage wise handles 20TB so far with no issues. The only remaining test I want to do since the J-Marvell controller might be compatible is try putting a RAID set of drives from my mediasonic ProRAID collection into this case and see if it mounts the datapool correctly. Haven't had a chance to do that yet and would be epic if it was compatible. Definitely recommend this just keep in mind the fan is a bit small and you may want to increase ventilation if you plan to hammer the RAID with I/O all day (get a cheap $5 fan), The case is not 100% silent but no where near the loudness some complain about. Customer service has so far been responsive hopefully never need them. Happy data hoarding!

One of the standout features for me is that no screws are required for drive installation, which makes the setup process incredibly quick and hassle-free. It’s a thoughtful design that also makes future maintenance much easier. The RAID configuration options are straightforward to navigate, so setting up for different storage or redundancy needs is simple. While I haven’t put the enclosure through intensive performance tests yet, I haven’t encountered any issues during my use so far. The build quality feels solid, and the cooling is effective without being noisy or generating excess heat. Overall, I’m very happy with how user-friendly and reliable the CENMATE enclosure has been. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for easy, worry-free external storage.

Great small Raid device, for those with extra drives setting around. I love the easily removable bays, and how easy it is to add the drives. For full size drives, there is side rails that pressure fit into the side screw holes of the drives, taking just seconds to attach. For 2.5 drives, the rail closest to the drive needs to be removed, which is easy to do, as it just snaps off the drive bay, and then you use the included screws to attach drive to bay.. which is quick and easy to do. The drive bays inset and engage smoothly. The power adapter and USB cable are included. And love that there is on/off switch on back of chassis. HOWEVER, I had some problem with HDD drives being recognized and configured as a Raid One. After trying a few combinations of the reset button-on switch-and holding reset in long enough, unit finally did it's thing and created the Raid 1 that I had set the configuration to. File transfer speeds are adequate. AS for FAN NOISE - I saw reviews that complained about this - HOWEVER - on my unit fan noise was negligible, with the fans in my desktop computer being louder. Maybe mine features an upgraded fan, so for me I am very satisfied. They do have Raid Manager software on their website, which I downloaded. It connects to the unit, with an intuitive interface, and may be a better route for you raid setup initially.

5/5 for being rock solid and free of "issues". I plugged it into my home lab server and within seconds I had 8 JBODs looking at me. Wowza! And I've transferred many TB of data already, pretty much maxing out the USB interface for weeks on end at 5 GB, no issues. Yes, at 5Gbs It takes a while to fill any of today's high capacity drives, but that's USB, and even SATA isn't much faster. I'll probably buy another soon. The only gotcha: at least on my Linux systems, if I try to hot swap any drives, they all reset, causing any data transfers underway to stop. Since this is a very rare occurrence, I'm ignoring it, and committing to shutting all drives down and powering down before I change drives.

I'm using this on my Mac Studio as my Time Machine. I spent 15 mins trying to figure out what was wrong with this enclosure. I resetted it multiple times and nothing worked. I can see that when resetting its doing something but was not popping up on the Mac. Thankfully I have a Windows machine and so I plugged it in and it started working. And the enclosure identified the mode that I chose correctly which was Raid 1. I was also able to format the drive. So I came to thinking and hoped theres a firmware update because the description does say MacOS is supported and wanted to use this as my Time Machine. So I went to the site and found the firmware. They had two different model types, I also dont really know the difference. They have 802TC and 802RU. I tried 802TC and it did not work and then tried 802RU it started to work. The instructions were subpar, it had screenshots and and written in chinese. However, the document had a translation section in english which was nice. That being said after updating the firmware, it started to work on the Mac. And right now its finally backing up. I'm most likely going to return it, i dont know how reliable this is given that it did not work out of the box. Funny thing is that the firmware that came with it is the same version as the one I used to flash the enclosure. 'Like why did it work after the flash and not out of the box given that its the same firmware version' One thing to Point out, I may have the wrong version. The picture on the description has a flat rubber feet whereas this one doesn't, if anything it looks like the old model.

Buying this enclosure turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. The enclosure I received is clearly a return as it has scuff marks on the case and bottom -- on the rubber feet, especially, you can see dust that's been caked in. The USB cord which the package says should be there is missing. So I can only conclude that Amazon is mixing some of their returns with the new units and shipping them out and hoping customer do not complain about it. I've had a few similar experiences with Amazon purchases in the past few years. To me, it's an indication that the company is just more about getting the products out the door than caring about the customer. That said, the enclosure itself works OK so far. I'm using it as a stopgap RAID 1 unit to transfer some of my homelab backup files while I fix a failing RAID unit. So this is not a mission critical task but a temporary one. The enclosure is fairly well made for its price but it is nevertheless built to a price. I usually avoid the firmware RAID implementations these cheap enclosures use as their performance is really a crap shoot. So I'm setting up the RAID on my Mac using the Disk Utility RAID assistant and that makes it easy to diagnose if a problem arises. The drives can be mounted using the tool-less brackets. There are plastic strips on the bracket with pins that snap into the side screw holes on the drives to keep them in place -- so that is pretty convenient. In summary, the enclosure seems decently made for its price, though I would not use it for mission critical storage scenarios. I always make sure I have multiple backups replicated locally and remotely for important files regardless of the hardware. One important thing I remind myself of is that the hardware my files are stored on will fail eventually. It's just a matter of when that happens. Replicating the backups will decrease the probability of the files being lost completely. So I keep that calculus in mind when I add these enclosure into my homelab setup. Don't rely on the hardware to keep your backups safe. Use a good replication strategy (like a 3-2-1 backup: 3 copies of your data, 2 different media, one copy off-site). I don't know about the longevity of this enclosure as I've had it for less than a day.

I used this to upgrade from my old NAS. My old nas was giving me 1.4 to 2 megabits per second transfer rate, so I decided to get this, move the drives over, and connect it to an old PC I had. Now I was getting 50 to 60 megabits per second transfer speed for my files and it was great. I got this one because I wanted to use the hardware RAID 1 array, but then I decided I didn't want to be locked into any particular vendor, so I decided to go with Linux software raid and set this back to normal mode. When I did that it turned out my drives from the NAS had already been set up for software RAID 1 by the NAS, so my old PC was able to just immediately detect them and start working so I didn't have to reformat anything. It was great! And the fans aren't too noisy. I have it in a little cabinet and most of the time I can't hear it unless I'm walking right past it.

Easy to set up. Works perfectly.