Review on Mediasonic USB 3.1 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - High-Speed USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C/USB-C (10Gbps) for Efficient Data Transfer by Billy Stull

Good:* This device runs USB 3.1 and has fantastic transfer speeds.* The case is nice and looks very modern* The drive bays fit snugly enough that there is no noticeable rattling or noise from the hard drives Bad: * The creators clearly told the engineers to get lost and decided to make it too functional. There is a fan and air vent in the back, but NO vents in the front to allow air to flow through the windows. I mean come on Mediasonic!. Radiant cooling only works when air can enter, flow through the hard drives, and exit the enclosure. Without air intake, this process is not possible.* In this case, the two drives quickly overheated when the fan was set to "Auto". The enclosure was in an air conditioned room at approximately 75°F. Both drives reached temperatures above 110°F and caused SMART* monitoring to fail. The only solution to the airflow problem is to open the front door or disassemble it. In fact, I opened the CD case door.* With the front door open and the fan turned on manually, it does an excellent job of cooling the discs. Unfortunately, the open front flap also makes the hard drive and fan noise quite loud. So it works great and does what it promises, but only if the front door is left open. I plan on removing the door and making room for a bolt on fan grill and screen. However, if I need more of these I will spend more and get a better designed product like the ORICO Aluminum 4 Bay that isn't much bigger. Alternatively, the older Mediasonic design is much better as it actually has air intakes in the front. Update: After using it for some time I can say it does a good job of keeping the drives cool with the door open. Most importantly, the USB 3.1 controller appears to be stable and works well on Linux. I tested the 4.9.x (Debian Stretch) and 4.16.x (Debian Buster) kernels on the AMD X470 chipset. So I am increasing the rating to 4 stars as it is functional even if they screwed up without putting a window on the door.