Review on 💾 Terramaster D5-300C USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type C 5-Bay RAID Enclosure - RAID 0/1/Single Support, Exclusive 2+3 RAID Mode, Diskless Hard Drive RAID Storage by Andy Baker

I checked three unnamed bays (Belkin and others) for attached USB/ESATA drives. They all stopped working. This is my fourth (? maybe fifth). A multi-bay card typically has a card with drive connectors as a riser on the back of the device - the drive is inserted and connected to the card. There is a fan behind the circuit board. Yes, where all flow is blocked by the board. This, of course, leads to possible failure due to overheating. This removes this nonsense. No giant circuit board on the back and two fans instead of one. Hot-swappability is virtually non-existent on these types of multi-section devices, no matter what they claim. My last four bays were hot swappable by resetting the entire device when a drive was removed and resetting it again when it was added. Windows lost all four USB drives and recreated them on every reset. Even two-piece blocks have done this crap. This unit has its own peculiarity. I just removed the 5th EMPTY plastic bay cover, two hard drives remained and two hard drives disappeared for no reason. No real discs were touched, just a piece of loose plastic cover. Only one returned. I had to reboot to get the fourth hard drive back. Sigh. If it is not touched, it works fine. I have 4 Barracuda 2TB drives. All individual drives. My transfer speeds were as good as you'll see with USB protocols. When copying video files from one drive to another in the same USB enclosure, the transfer rate was around 20MB/s (160Mbps). My network and home SAN can triple the speed. Even USB3 is still slow compared to other technologies. The first two slots can be configured as mirrors for what I bought (model 2+3). Most likely I would just add a fifth hard drive. With four drives running 24/7 and all drives actively writing/reading video content every day, drive temperatures are around 45°C/113°F. that's higher than I like (the room is pretty cool right now). Dual fans generate little airflow. I feel the air is hot but when I mostly cover it with my hand. It's like they're not even running. I can't tell they're running just by sticking something in and hearing the fan bang against it. So you are calm. Has been working continuously for over a year. I never change configurations or drives, so it looks stable, although my testing shows that if you need hot-swapping, these cheaper products just don't offer it. I might try swapping out the fans to lower drive temperatures further. Keeping them under 40 will extend life.