Review on 📁 Yottamaster 5 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure, Aluminum Alloy 2.5" & 3.5" SATA HDD/SSD External Storage Enclosure with 80mm RGB Silent Fan, Supports 5X18TB Capacity for PC DIY Experts & Gamers [DF5U3] by Brooke Daniels

I bought this enclosure because it looks like Apple's latest generation Mac Pro had a baby baby with a custom built PC. I bought a 5 bay version of this case with built in RAID capabilities. It's worth noting that the four-bay version is just a case, although you can easily set it up as a RAID with Windows Storage Spaces, which I ended up doing with this one (read on to see why). The box looks and feels really great, and the RGB lighting adds a nice touch when switched on. This is a truly unique external enclosure solution that will please Mac fans and custom PC lovers alike. Personally, I built and bought my own PC to store all the huge photo and video files I capture with my Sony A7rIV and A7riii. Some people say that the fan of this device is very noisy. As someone who has been building PCs for years and knows what to expect from different fans with different speeds, I would say this is about what I would expect from a tiny 80mm fan running at full speed. For those who are curious, the fan itself uses a proprietary two-pin header, is not PWM, and does not scale with temperature. Regarding the noise of the device, I noticed that the acrylic panels had no spacers between them and the aluminum body of the case. They clatter and can get quite loud during heavy read/write tasks. Maybe that's what some people have attributed to the fan. A tiny silicon bead in the middle of each plate between the screws solves this problem. Hopefully Yottamaster will add another set of screws in the middle of the plate or add a spacer to prevent this in future iterations of their design. When you open the case, note that there are two metal clips on either side of the device that can scratch the soft acrylic panel fairly easily. You can gently push them in or put something between them and the glass to prevent them or the top of the device from falling off first (this method is much harder). in random order - even during read/write operations. To solve this problem, I disabled hard drive hibernation in the Windows power plan and downloaded two software programs from the Yottamaster website. One lets you easily write new settings to the device's firmware, and the other is full-featured software that allows you to manage arrays and configure various other device settings. I found that setting sleep to "0" (0 = no sleep) on one did not change the setting on the other. To prevent the case from constantly shutting down, I found that both should be set to '0'. Another oddity I noticed with the software is that the drive numbers shown there do not match the numbers physically printed on the side of the drive bays on the device. For example, drive 1 appears on the device as drive 5 in the software. I'm not sure if mine was miswired or if the software just needs to be reprogrammed to accurately reflect the correct physical bay number. I set up a RAID 10 array using the onboard switch-based utility, then set the enclosure to standard mode and used Windows Storage Spaces to create a RAID 10 configuration. I ran speed tests on both configurations and found that I significantly increased read and write speeds (around 20/40 Mbit/s) allowing Windows to manage the RAID setup instead of using the onboard RAID manager on the device . === PROS == =-Probably the best looking RAID enclosure available today. Sturdy and well constructed. The RGB fan and tinted acrylic panels give the device a nice aesthetic look. After some tweaking, it works flawlessly for several weeks. ==-Fan uses a patented 2-pin connector-Acrylic panels can vibrate against the case under heavy loads and cause extra noise-Out of the box, you need to download software to prevent it from going to sleep every 5 minutes -Show the side drive numbers do not match the numbers printed on the physical device