Yottamaster 10Gbps 5 Bay USB C Hard Drive Enclosure Daisy Chain, Type-C External HDD Enclosure Support 2.5" & 3.5" SATA HDD/SSD up to 5X18TB, Non-RAID DAS Support 270TB Storage Expansion [FS5C3]

A bit expensive but does a stellar job. Currently operating with 5 18TB HDD very quiet and fast access to the files, also used the second USB-C port to daisy chain with a enclosure of a different brand and works fine.

Bought a pair of these (which I'm about to return) to replace some Orico enclosures that only suffer from bad airflow. Physically these are very nice, the cooling is a lot better, and the (no key) locking bays feel nice and secure. Build quality is really nice, and they *feel* very good. Sadly they are unusable. Despite anything you may find online there is no way to turn off the sleep timer on these (non-RAID) - directly contacting Yottamaster had a reply from them stating that they do not support that option, and the official software / firmware for this does nothing. Additionally plugging known good drives (Toshiba 10tb) in has resulted in generating actual SMART disk errors on most of them (even to the point of Linux marking them as read-only) - this was not related to the drives being awake or otherwise, and placing them back in the Orico bays (and a new Orico bay that I just bought for data migration) has resulted in no further errors (where they were gaining up to 20 errors per day!!) If they sort out these issues then I really like them - the features would make them very useful if they fix these issues - but I know I won't be buying from the brand again as a result of this...

Bought as a need for a solution to access and making use of old mechanical 3.5' hard drives thats been accumulated over the years storing data. Build quality is very good and seems robust enough. Set up is easy and OS picks up the loaded HDDs. About the sleep mode - behaviour varies. Am running dual boot Win10/Linux Mint. On windows 10 it doesn't go to sleep mode if not in use/accessing and even after shut down, you can hear the drives still spinning...until you flick the switch off at the back of the drive bay enclosure. On Linux Mint, all the drives initially were mounted, but then dismount those that were not being accessed/used. Strange behaviour patterns. Will need to use it for a longer period to understand how all this works and see if any changes when tinkering with settings. Overall, a good solution for my needs.

Avoid at all costs. As others have said - used as a straightforward DAS and once under load for a while it will corrupt at least one drive requiring a reformat and loss of data. Thus useless for Plex etc. Return window is only 90 days and customer service is a joke - email to a Chinese rep who stopped replying after the first two emails - have been trying every couple of days since but don’t hold out hope. Now an expensive paperweight and shelling out for a more reputable brand - should have done that it the first place. Choose something else.

The product looks nice, however I couldn't open 3 of the 5 slots. Therefore I will be returning it.

I was looking for an enclosure to run a NAS powered by a raspberryPi I am overall happy with the results. My 2 existing drives where recognised instantly from previous setup Noise level and heat is acceptable

With no drives attached, this idles at 3w, and roughly 3w per additional idle drive attached, so power consumption is good. 80mm rear fan is very quiet but does have a slight hum that you can hear from close by. You could swap it for a Noctua if you wanted, its just screwed in, and you can access the back of the unit just by unscrewing the rear screws with a torx bit. Its detected and ran without issue, a whole variety of 2.5 and 3.5 mechanical drives I threw at it, but does seem to be picky with SSDs. Your mileage might vary.

Returned: I put four WD 8TB drives in this device and one 6TB Seagate. Over the space of a few days, drives would randomly disappear from the list of those available. Then, after restarting Windows, they would report as having bad sectors and become innaccessible. I removed them from the Yottamaster and put them in a single external unit and then ended up having to reformat and scan them for errors. All drives are actually perfectly ok, but most of the data was irretrievable. Basically 3 years worth of backups. OS / Photos / music libraries and so-on were lost. Luckily I have other offline backups, otherwise, this experience would have been catastrophic for me. To my mind, this device is not fit for purpose. Hopefully, it was just a defective unit.