Syba 8 Bay Tool Less Tray Hot Swappabe 2.5" 3.5" SATA Non Raid External USB 3.0 Enclosure SY-ENC50119

Works great, holds both 3.5” and 2.5” drives. Decent transfer rates. The fans are super quiet I hear the drives over the fans.

This is great value.As per other reviews here, I am astounded at the build quality and inclusions with this product. It comes with a couple of dozen little drive screws, which you would only need if you are installing 2.5 inch drives. And it comes with cables for both eSATA and USB 3.0, and they are not the usual short cables that come with drives - there is a little room to play here. I did not measure them but they are good. The POWER cord is only a couple of feet long, but it is a standard 3-prong IEC power cable! You can get one cheap anyplace you are, if you don't already have a couple of spares lying around.The RAID app is fun! I spent the day changing modes and testing speed. I've had RAID appliances before, but I'd never ever built a RAID, and it was pretty easy with the included software. I have to not that I used the software to set up my drives in it. I had an old Promise 6400 4-Bay enclosure from 2009 I think, and bay 4 was crapping out, so I took a chance on this Syba box to replace the failing Promise. I had the most recent 4x 5TB hard drives from that box, and a fifth 5TB drive I had as a spare, so in they went, and it's running fine on my Mac Mini 2012 running El Capitan. I am going in through eSATA into a Thunderbolt-to-eSATA dongle I had used with the Promise RAID. I'm currently running in RAID5. In every mode I was getting about 200MB/s up and down from this thing. It's a great box so far. If anything changes I will update this here review. Have a great day everyone!Update: a week into running this. The unit is fine, but the HW RAID Manager software for Mac now cannot see the enclosure, although the RAID volume does still mount perfectly on my desktop. I switched from eSATA to the USB connection to see if it helps, but it didn't change anything. I deleted the software management app as well as all of it's prefs and did a clean reinstall, and it still doesn't see the unit. It turned out that if I launch the application from my DOCK it won't see the drives, but if I launch the application from inside the Applications Folder the app operates correctly!! So do it that way, and all will be fine. The RAID Hardware is exceptionally well constructed, accessible, and runs very cool temperature-wise. I'm loving this thing!

Item is smaller than I expected. The item has weight and feels well built. Item comes with no instructions although the hard drive installation is straight forward.The trays install easily and lock into place. A firm pull is needed to remove a tray. The drive indicator lights on each tray are blue for power and red for activity with neither being too bright. On high setting I found the fan noise was not noticeable.The trays use a tool less design to install the hard drive. There are four pins on the side and one on the bottom that align with the screw holes on the hard drive. Be sure to align the pin on the bottom otherwise the hard drive will not fully fit into place.I performed file transfers of pictures to test the speed of the item. Speed is what you would expect from any external USB hard drive. In the 100+ MBS range for a single drive transfer. Multiple hard drive transfers divide this this total.To verify compatibility I installed four previously used hard drives in the enclosure. When the enclosure was powered on Windows 10 automatically recognized all the drives and all their original content was still accessible.I have since installed 4 new Toshiba X300 8TB drives and they worked flawlessly in the enclosure.

I bought two of these and put (4) WD Red 6TB drives in each. I tried to use them with an HP P420 array controller's external SATA (eSata) port, but that did not work. It only saw 1 6TB drive, and weirdly that seems to be the case even when in a RAID 5 configuration. Setup with software is easy. Setup with the switches on the back is difficult. Instructions say to hold the button down for 15 secs or something like that, but they don't say whether to do that with the unit on or off or while starting or connected to a computer or not connected or whatever. It would be nice if the instruction manual were more clear.The array does not appear to offer the option of hot spare, which is a shame. I wanted to do 5 drives with 4 in RAID 5 and one hot spare. No dice.I switched to USB and it works great. Make sure you plug it into a USB 3.x port. It is abysmally slow under USB 2, but quite fast under USB 3. There is a utility on the internet for Windows called USBTreeView that lets you look at your USB ports and verify that the port the array is connected to is 3.x capable.Why not 5 stars? My 1st unit worked great for 4 days, then the top 2 drive bays failed. I emailed Syba support and they responded in less than 10 minutes and gave me an RMA. I do not know how long it will take to receive a replacement. My concern is that these units may not be super reliable. I am thinking about ordering a spare in case it fails a lot.