IO CREST Hard Drive Enclosure Supports Multi Bay via USB Interface, Black, 8-Bay

This hard drive bay is a space saver and less cords to deal with! Yeah the trays are a little cheap and flimsy, but if you are careful the hard drives slide in easily. I can have up to 4 hard drives on at a time and that is pretty much perfect for me! All in all a great product and I have mostly 4tb hard drives installed in it. Would highly recommend!

I had a bunch of legacy drives and was swapping out my computer, I didn't want my new huge tower to be stuffed with hard drives for various reasons. This connected with USB quickly and all my drives showed up in Linux. It even works with LUKS (encryption) without problem.Just a note: This isn't RAID nor did I want it, but in certain cases transferring files will be slow. Especially between drives in the same tower -- the nature of USB is that the processor has to handle it and send it down the same wire. Imagine a 1 car tunnel on a two way street. One side passes, then has to yield to the other side. Yeah, it's gonna be slower than a seamless flow of 2 way traffic. It'll eventually get it done but is not something for speed demons. For a faster exchange of data from drives into the tower to another, I would suggest keeping the drive you are transferring data to from the others via a seperate cable - whether internal to your computer tower or a seperate single enclosure - I had various external drives that I just took apart and put the new HDD in without much problem.As it is, it's perfect for those drives you put the random files on or archive. I'm reading about those who are putting SDDs in these and expecting speed -- USB is not appropriate for speed in the first place. That's what SATA/eSATA is for at the least, although NVMe is fastest. Second, you're not gonna split 4/8 drives and get cutting edge speed. Does not happen.Great for archival, transfer of files if you have time, and storing HDDs out of the way but still usable. Bad for getting the most speed out of your drives, especially if accessing 2+ at a time.

Bought this to condense my seven external drives into one case and more importantly one power plug and one usb cable plugged into the computer. Have had for more than a week and is doing great for simple data disks. I already had a 4 disk case from the same company and now have backups in a separate case. Have had the 4 disk case for over a year without any issues, so I did not hesitate to get the 8 disk case from the same company. I do like that you can turn off individual disks in the 8 disk case.

Pros: It is actually a very well thought out unit. Nothing hidden about it, it is as described. Very nice touch having individual power buttons so each drive can be controlled individually. Drive installation is easy. You can go from unboxing to online with drives mounted in 5 minutes or less. Pro tip... If you are not getting high speed transfers, try multiple ports. It took me several tries to find a port on my computer that would transfer at high speed even though all of them are supposed to be USB 3.0. I find the fan is quiet and the drives do stay fairly cool.Cons: Very short power cord. Seriously I think it is like a 24" length. So, if you are putting it up on a desk you need to have power nearby or be using a longer cord. I find that some things will randomly reset the entire USB bus. Could be cable, or loose connection, I'll have to monitor this. but still, when you want to reset just one drive it is nice not having to power cycle the entire unit. I have one gripe with the unit where it seems one drive in particular, once it is put to sleep it doesn't like to wake back up, and if I try to eject that drive it also locks up horribly. Sounds more like a compatibility issue between this particular drive and the unit, but to put it out there, that can happen.My biggest formal gripe with the design... The drive trays. ALL they have to do is add a notch or a grip for getting the drive tray out. Once you install a drive it can be hard to remove the drive because of the lack of anything to grip on the tray.It's only been about a week but so far, I'm actually impressed with the unit for the cost I paid.

The 8 drive bay worked beautifully with 6 of my drives attached, a 10 TB, 8 TB, 2x 6 TB, and 2x 4 TB. Thermals were good, fans were whisper silent, speeds were slow but acceptable (despite USB 3.0 on paper supporting 600 MB/s transfer speeds, this gets around 150 MB/s shared across ALL drives). Why the one star? It gets I/O errors randomly. There is no real rhyme or reason to it, but every so often a drive would disconnect entirely and disappear from Explorer OR it would appear, show my folders, but any attempt to open them was met with an I/O Disk Read Error. These drives had no issues before being placed in the enclosure and after being put BACK into my machine (originally got this since I wanted to swap my case but finding a mid-tower with 6+ 3.5'' bays like my Phantom 410 is not an easy task anymore) leads me to believe that the enclosure is at fault.There also is a nasty little design flaw that Syba informed me WAS expected behaviour: The drives will enter sleep after a certain amount of inactivity regardless of any settings in Windows be it USB sleep settings or hard disk sleep settings. This is an issue if you're using these for a media server like I was. There's a noticeable delay when the drives spin back on and almost all of the times I got that dreaded I/O error was when a drive was waking. If given that I/O error the only way to fix it was to physically turn either the drive on and off or the whole enclosure. Not an ideal solution, and I couldn't safely eject any time I did this as Windows would tell me the drive was in use.If you value your data, I would steer clear using this as a daily driver. Maybe as an on-site backup, but if you want to actually USE the drives installed regularly, look elsewhere.