Hard Drive Enclosure, CENMATE Aluminum 2 Bay RAID Enclosure with Fan for 2.5/3.5 SATA HDD/SSD with USB A/C 3.0, Tool Free, 4 Mode(Support RAID 1/0/JBOD/NORMAL)

Just what I needed to house some hard drives to feed my new media player. Simple to set up and get going. I will only be using this in the simple mode that allows the four drives to work independently and so can't comment on the RAID functions but it does what I need and at a decent price.

It is easy to set up and raid, simple to add drives, and works great on USB 3, all together worth the money.Having said that it looses a star for absolute lying.Its not got a silent fan its louder than my PC and my NAS drives combined, I can hear it 10 foot away, why on earth would they have such a lousy fan? its not as if a silent one cost much, Its pointless, and makes them look stupid, its going to be replaced obviously with a better fan, but why would anyone make such a big mistake for the sake of a couple of £?Great product as far as I can see, spoilt for no reason whatsoever by a cheap fan.

Super easy to set up and the manual is pretty good. One quibble is that what both the manual and label on the device call Normal and JBOD configuration modes, I would call JBOD and simple spanning. JBOD (called Normal for the device) gives you two separately mounted drives. Simple spanning (called JBOD for the device) catenates the storage on the drives together to give you one large volume. Initially, I have configured the disks as RAID-0 (striped) to give me higher throughput performance than simple spanning, but with no redundancy against drive failure. My eventual use case is to make backups, for which I shall reconfigure the device with higher capacity HDDs as RAID-1 (mirrored) to provide redundancy. Obviously, RAID-10 (combined striping and mirroring) is not an option with only two HDDs.The noise level is not very intrusive and isn't a concern given how I will be using it. It might not be suitable for accessing media files and a NAS solution might be more appropriate in that case.I purchased the enclosure for £52, which I consider good value given its capabilities.

Pretty good, not noisy, not quiet. Fan doesn't seem to be very powerful, but it does its job effectively.

I bought this 4-bay unit a few days ago. So far, so good. It is performing well. Notes on installation of new drives (ie first time install with unformatted hard drives:I have a QNAP NAS to which I attached this Raid unit as an external Raid 5 drive. I used a USB socket. I bought 4x Ironwolf 4Tb hard drives. They are new, unused drives. Their form is std 3.5". They slot into the bays on this unit and clip into the blue plastic clips. NB: you must make sure the blue studs clip properly into the threaded holes along the side of the hard drive - the bay won't slide closed unless they fully inserted - you may have to push quite hard to get them in. Once all the drives are in place and the trays closed, connect the unit to your system but don't turn it on. Choose what raid system you want by setting the switches as explained in the guide and painted on the back of the unit. Once the switches are set, press the reset button in and hold it in. With the reset button depressed, power on the unit, holding the reset button for more than 10 secs (I held it for 12 secs). Release the reset button. After a while (a few minutes) the unit will be listed in your list of external drives with the description 'uninitialised'. Select format drive now and click ok to the loss of data warning. After several minutes the drive will show as available. I'm running mine on Raid 5 so, with 4x 4Tb drives, I get 12Tb of space with hardware redundancy of one drive failure.

Bought this item to use as a storage and back up for my new M4 Mac mini. Sadly it was a poor choice. Constant errors as the drives disconnect. After a few hours only one of the bays worked and so got more errors. Looks good solid built so 1 star but sadly not fit for purpose. Others have said it's possible to get some software online but I shouldn't have to. If you have a Mac I would steer clear. Saying that it could be the same issues on a PC but I haven't got one to try it on.

Personally, I wouldn't trust the RAID controller (maybe for mirroring, but not for striping). Using mine as an enclosure for two 2.5" SSDs as part of a media centre setup. The drives aren't RAIDed, but it's not for anything I really care about. If one drive dies, I'll lose whatever is on it... but not the whole thing. In this setup it's just a dual USB - SATA adapter in a fairly nice box. With a power supply provided.Note that the fan will always be on if the USB is plugged in and the unit is powered, there is no temperature control of any kind. It's not super loud, but something to consider if you're planning on using it often. With SSDs the unit doesn't really need the fan, so I installed a small switch at the rear to control it. My drives haven't gone over 35 degrees even under heavy use (they're fine up to 40, but if you go much over that it starts to reduce the lifespan of the disk). Mechanical HDDs will need probably the fan.Enclosure seems well built. Trays are a bit plasticky, but I doubt you'll be swapping them about very often.Two lights per drive... Blue seems to be always on, red flashes when the drive is in use.

The product is well-made and solid; however, the fan is a bit noisy. Buyers might want to find some way to cushion the feet, which are solid if the enclosure is on a hard surface, such as a desk, as the vibration of the fan could be annoying. Don't expect a huge amount of support should you need it. I did get a quick response, but it soon became obvious that they were unable to help me to any great extent, so they stopped replying to my emails.I did eventually sort the problem myself by trial and error.