Review on Yottamaster Aluminum Drive Enclosure Support by Cody Mckechnie

Is it worth spending money on a cheap unknown RAID array instead of spending double or triple for a trusted brand? The short answer is yes. with reservation. I was looking for a RAID system to support video editing. Actually, I buy this by accident; I wanted to buy a 5 compartment Yottamaster but I made a mistake when ordering and it was too late to cancel. The advantage of a 5-bay unit is that RAID 5 has better capacity efficiency because only 1 in 5 drives stores parity data, not 1 in 4; it's also theoretically a faster specification. However, when I asked Yottamaster if actual speeds were comparable, they said the 5-platter block didn't have a significant speed advantage. I was concerned that the speed and reliability of this cheap device would match the bigger brands. However, when you read reviews of some well-known brands, people can be quite critical of reliability. Unfortunately, I don't know how reliable this is until the drive fails, which can take several years. I tried to eject the drive while the RAID 5 system was online and in use, but this unit doesn't support hot-swap drives, so all I got was a beep and an error message. As soon as I swapped out the hard drive, it reinitialized and returned to the network normally, apparently with no data loss. Obviously the key to a RAID 5 system is how it handles data recovery in the event of a hard drive failure; I couldn't easily verify this. In terms of speed, I get around 200MB/s writing and 250MB/s reading, which is more or less exactly what Yottamaster said of me. This is about 2x to 2.5x the speed of the same drives used separately. However, that's not quite the 3x theoretical speed you could get with RAID 5. Honestly, if you want a lightning-fast RAID enclosure, spend more money. This isn't a huge issue for me as I can edit the SSD if I need something fast (something like a T3 SSD is about twice as fast as this RAID enclosure on my system that supports USB3.0). Setup isn't difficult; You set the DIP switches according to the manual (and the sticker on the back of the device), use a pen to press the reset button on the back, and then turn it on. I didn't read the manual to get started, so I missed something about clicking the button. If your device just shows up as a series of hard drives, this may be the reason. The device is much quieter than I expected. There's an active fan on the back, but with 4 drives and a running fan, it's fairly unobtrusive. Build quality is pretty much what you would expect; The front door is a little dim and you can't see the drive status LEDs properly when the door is closed. The plastic drive trays are quite functional, but nothing special. So if you want a cheap and functional RAID system, I don't see anything wrong with it. If you need high performance, spend more money than you would expect.