Mediasonic USB 3.2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure DAS – USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C | USB-C (HF7-SU31C) Support 30TB HDD

I've been a loyal Mediasonic customer for years, having owned an older version of their 4-bay hard drive enclosure, which I absolutely loved. It was a workhorse, reliable, and served my storage needs perfectly. When I saw the Mediasonic USB 3.2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure DAS (HF7-SU31C) with USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C, I knew it was time for an upgrade, and I'm so glad I did! This new enclosure takes everything I appreciated about the older model and elevates it. The USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C connection is a game-changer. Data transfer speeds are incredibly fast, making backups and large file transfers feel instantaneous. I'm currently using it with 24TB HDDs, and it handles them flawlessly. Setup was a breeze, just like with my previous Mediasonic enclosure. The build quality is solid, and the design is sleek and efficient. It runs quietly, and the drives stay cool even under heavy use. If you're looking for a reliable, high-speed, and well-built external hard drive enclosure, look no further. Whether you're upgrading like me or buying your first, the Mediasonic HF7-SU31C is an outstanding choice. Highly recommend!

Good: * This unit does work on USB 3.1 and has really fantastic transfer rates. * The case is beautiful and looks very modern * The drive trays fit snugly enough where there is not any noticeable rattle or noise from the hard disks Bad: * The makers clearly told the engineers to get lost and opted to make this pretty over functional. There is a fan and an air outlet in the back, but there is NO venting at all in the front to let air in to flow over the drives. I mean, come on Mediasonic!. Radiant cooling only works when air can get in, pass over the drives, and the exit the case. That process cannot occur when there is no air inlet. * Two drives quickly overheated in this case with the fan set to "Auto". The case was in an air-conditioned room at about 75 F. The drives both reached over 110F and trigged SMART monitoring failures. * The only solution to the airflow issue is to open the front door or break it off. In fact, I have popped my door open with a CD jewel case. * With the front door open and the fan turned up manually, it does a great job of cooling the drives. Unfortunately, the front door open also makes the drives and fan noise pretty loud. In summary, it works great and does everything it promises, but only when the front door is kept open. I plan to take the door off and cut space for a screw-on fan grill and screen. Though, if I need any more of these, I will spend more and get a better designed product, such as the ORICO Aluminum 4 Bay that is not that much more. Alternatively, the older Mediasonic design is much better because it actually has air flow inlets in the front. Update: After use for a while of use, I can say it does a good job of keeping the drives cool with the door open. Most critically, the USB 3.1 controller seems stable and works well in Linux. I tested both kernels 4.9.x (Debian Stretch) and 4.16.x (Debian Buster) on an AMD X470 chipset. So, I am raising my rating to 4 stars, since it is functional, even if they screwed up by not putting a vent in the door.

Great enclosure and good chipset. Fan is not loud -- have this in a closet and is keeping my 2 drives under 45C. Plug-n-play with Linux. Really like the shutdown sync when the computer is off. Definitely would recommend.

I have had this less than a month and I found it worked really well at first. But do not be deceived. This product has a feature that will ultimately kill your drives too if you are not careful. That feature is the "Sync" feature. It is supposed to put the drives to sleep when the computer is turned off. I was having separate issues with a new m.2 drive in my system and was getting system crashes due to it. I didn't think this device was the issue, but wanted to just double check anyway. I can now confirm it was not the issue as of this writing. I unplugged the device from my computer. The device shut off, the fan shut off and I thought I heard the drives turn off. It was quiet. Fast forward about 2-3 days of me testing without this being plugged in. I decided to swap some drives in it before plugging it back up and when I did I found the internal drives were incredibly hot to the touch. We keep our water at 140F (60C) degrees and this felt hotter than that water. The drives clearly were not turning themselves off like they should, like this device should tell them to do. They stayed on that entire time, all while the fan automatically shut off, so they never got any cooling. So far, I've spent the last hour running them in the device trying to cool them off to test. Up to this point, I am able to get the data off of them, luckily, but the SMART functionality of the drives seem dead. None of the 4 drives will read any smart data in my HDD utility "HDTune". This is worrisome as I can only imagine how hot they truly got. They were absolutely baking in that thing. I am extremely worried about longterm with them now due to the extreme heat. The moral of this story is, this device does seem very good and I will not be returning it. But whatever you do, DO NOT USE the "Sync" mode. Make sure Sync is off and the fan should still run. There is no way to turn off the fan unless it goes to "sleep" or disconnects from the computer with sync mode ON. With it off, this thing will run forever, but at least they will get consistently cooled. I will update this if anything actually changes with those drives in the near future. Update: As I was about to submit the review, I am now seeing the SMART information from the drives. Notes: Due to the extreme potential risk to your data, this will stay at 1 star for others to read. Inside temperature was around 71F this entire time.

I got this to declutter the shelf where my home media server lives. Instead of having 4 USB drives sitting on the shelf I now have this one box connected via USB-C to a mini-PC with no internal storage beyond an NVMe SSD. It's very quick and works perfectly well but does NOT support hardware RAID. One could make a software RAID using Windows 10/11 Professional, note that the specs state this enclosure does not work with Linux. I have not tested it with Linux. The sync button is interesting. With sync turned on the enclosure powers up and down with the computer to which it is attached but will not recover from a power failure, that requires a human intervention to push the power button on the front. I cannot really fault this enclosure, for the price it is a great deal.

Good for the price...I suppose

Very easy to install, works well and reliable as well as very quiet

Like others, I removed the front case for better air flow. A star is taken off for the super flimsy front cover. But the enclosure works flawlessly so far, no disconnecting with my pc at all. Great speeds. Update on 30/1/2021, after 4 months of use. Enclosure has failed. Bays 2/3 stopped working, leaving 1 and 4. 4 slowly went away as well. Gave me the impression that my drives were failing

As a long time Mac user, I already knew that most HD enclosures work with any OS, but you needn't be put off by the "Minimum OS Version " they say, which is 10.13.xx I set it up on a legacy Mac system (Snow Leopard OSX 10.6.6) and it recognized the drives perfectly. I'm not sure if it's the same for PC OS's such as Windows or Linux, but it should be. It feels like a really sturdy unit, and really cuts down on the amount of cables needed. One thing, the included cable is a USB3 mini plug to USB3 mini plug.. in order to plug into older computers with a standard USB 1or2 input you'll need an adapter or an appropriate cable. It may look like a charging cable but it's not.. you'll need a high capacity cable with close to the same thickness as the supplied one..