Review on 🔒 Highly Durable and Dust-Proof: SilverStone Technology Military Grade-IP65 2.5" SATA Drive Enclosure with USB 3.0 MMS01B by Josh Whitehead

This is a very well designed enclosure. Very easy to set up. Within half an hour of receiving the package, I installed the drives, configured the RAID array, and copied the files to the array. I didn't specifically mention what struck me, the included software. I'm using Windows and haven't checked if there are versions for other platforms. The software allows you to bypass the setting of the hardware switches and any use of the front panel. Install the software, connect the array to your computer and you can do it all from your desktop. You may already need to understand the different forms of RAID and which ones to use. There was very little handshaking in that regard. But if you know what you want to do, the software will make it easy for you. At least using all four drives in a RAID 5 array worked for me. After setting up the array, it should show up in Windows Disk Management and you can format it. Windows sees the array as a single device. You can create multiple partitions like any other hard drive. I formatted mine as one large partition. I have an array connected to a Plugable USB 3.0 hub along with three other external USB 3.0 drives. Transfer speeds from other external drives average around 80MB/s. Transferring a large file from my SSD showed the array could reach over 175MB/s. So there's nothing to complain about in terms of speed, at least now that the array is new. A minor downside is that the array turns itself off after five minutes of inactivity by default. This disables it on Windows. It came back online as soon as I tried to access it. The only real downside is Windows' annoying habit of beeping every time a device is connected or disconnected. The setup software allows you to change the timeout value, including setting it to zero, which I think disables the feature. I changed it to 60 minutes and will see how it works. You must use the advanced mode in the software to access the timeout setting. Another minor downside is that there is no printed documentation for this device. The instructions are on the supplied CD. That's a good thing, because the manual actually contains about half a page of instructions in English for using the case as a RAID array. The remaining 97 pages describe how to use the unit as a disk duplicator. Very good if that's your intended use, but pointless if you need an external RAID array. This hasn't dropped in my ranking as setup via software was fairly easy, but it would still be nice to have some basic printed instructions. I've only had the device for a few hours, so it's not possible at the moment. to indicate how it will perform over time, but for now I'm very happy with it. I copied about 500GB of data to it and it works great. TO UPDATE. The RAID array has been in regular use for the past six months and I have absolutely nothing negative to say about it. It worked perfectly. A few years ago, when trying to set up a very fast new computer, I read some stuff that suggested that using file compression again was a good idea, not because it saves disk space, but because the hard drive uses the slowest element, and reducing the amount of data going to and from it should speed up the whole process. The new processors are said to be more than fast enough to decompress/compress data without significant impact on other processing. That sounded like solid logic, and in some cases it might be, but my experience with this RAID array is that you should avoid Windows file compression. I don't really think it's unique to this device, but I do know that I've sometimes seen transfers go about 10x faster than they should be and finally noticed that it was always with compressed folders. I switched everything in the RAID array to uncompressed and haven't noticed any slow transfers since. Just a warning. I started running array defragmentation software regularly. The standard Windows defragmentation software doesn't seem to do much. I tried several alternatives and finally settled on Auslogics Disk Defrag Pro. The first defrag operation literally took two days, but over 10 TB of files were defragmented and moved. Subsequent daily touch-ups are typically completed in less than an hour. I'm only mentioning it as something that works well with this device. Some of the others I tried were so slow they were useless. I'm not sure if the defrag part affects performance that much, but Auslogics also moves files around to make the open area contiguous. This helps a little I think when new data is written to the disk. Since I run this regularly, I haven't had any issues with occasional slow operations. In the six months I've been using it, I've moved almost 12TB to the RAID array, moved 4TB, and then activated another 2TB again. There is only one user, so I can't say how it will react in a more intense multi-user environment, but it fully met my expectations. I'm considering buying another one.