Yottamaster 4 Bay RAID Hard Drive Enclosure, Aluminum USB3.0 RAID Enclosure for 3.5 & 2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD, Support 72TB(4x18TB) Direct Attached Storage DAS RAID1/5/10/JBOD/CLONE [PS400RU3]

I recently purchased this product from Amazon and found it to be good quality and as described. It was easy to use and arrived on time and in great condition. The design is practical, and it seems durable. Overall, a solid purchase that I’m satisfied with. Would recommend.

Garbage. Plenty of bits of plastic from the drive trays all over. Read and followed the instructions for enabling RAID 5. Did not work. RAID 10 appeared to work and would have been fine, but at that point, I can't trust the device to function correctly long term. Contacted support and received no response.

I was ready to love this product at first sight for its simple, industrial design and good looks, but discovered that although it has good sides to it, it also has important limitations, and comes with very scant documentation. The good: solid aluminum housing with excellent heat dispension, very quiet fan, excellent esthetics, great capacity, RAID 0,1,3,5, and 10 and JBOD. The bad: flimsy door, flimsy, but functional trays. The software has very limited features, and the manual is outright poor. Two designated pairs of RAID1 is not offered. The ugly: After losing all my data repeatedly to I/O errors and an unexplained corruption of volumes, and on the verge of returning the whole device, I had to learn through user comments and FAQ's it has to be connected directly to the computer and not via a hub, replicator or docking station. Many frustrating hours later, I have it connected it DIRECTLY to a micro computer I had laying around, and lo! though fast no more, my new now 20TB RAID10 DAS-inadvertedly-turned-NAS hasn't missed a beat since, storing 22 years of digital photography - though I have kept separate backups for that special day in the future. Though this setup happens to suit me well for my needs, it might not be everybody's definition of sexy.

Pros: I got both their 4bays and 5bays HDD enclosures. They are great if you go by their price. Cons: The screws that supplied by the enclosure doesn't fit on the 2.5 SSDs drives I had. Both enclosure are big and heavy even without the HDD inside. The LED in the front are dim and barely visible to see.

I bought the 4 Bay RAID enclosure and outfitted it with four 12 TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in a RAID 5 setup. Setting up the RAID went smoothly, following all of the manufacturer instructions. Read/write speeds were good, and the RAID could be seen on both my Windows and Mac computers. I copied about 14 TB of data to the RAID and things were going great. Fast forward about 9 months later, read/write speeds started to get a little wonky. It had me concerned and I thought about backing up the RAID. Too late, as today I tried accessing the RAID and neither my Windows or Mac computers can access the RAID. Windows gives a straight up "file system is corrupted" error and my Mac can't see any of the folders but does show that 14 TB of data is in the RAID. I'm going to keep on trying to recover the RAID, and if successful I might adjust the rating. However, lesson learned. This is what you get for trying to do things on the cheap. Edit to add: I was able to recover my data from the RAID. First, I used some data recovery software to pull my files off the RAID and onto my internal HD. With 14 TB of data involved (including a deep scan), this took a few days actually. Then I compared the retrieved data with my backups of the RAID (it helps to be a digital pack rat - while I didn't have a dedicated RAID backup, I did have all of that data saved somewhere on a couple of external HDs. Good thing I hadn't gotten around to repurposing them!) and discovered that the recovery software got about 95% of the files back. I then found the remaining 5% on those HDs. I then consolidated all of that data, reformatted the RAID, and copied everything back onto it. Write speeds were about what they should be and so far have had no issues accessing data, so I reckon it's ok again. Still, I won't be using this as my only storage solution. Moving forward, I'll keep my working data on my internal HD, store a backup of working data and archive data on the RAID - which itself will also be backed up onto 2 dedicated external HDs. Better safe than sorry.

We ordered 2 units to serve as 24/7 as file server and plex media server. (we returned both, read on if you want to see why.) Pro: - we liked the thick aluminum enclosure which can be stacked and also placed side by side, if you have multiple. - the setup is very simple by selecting raid mode via dip switches on back. - the fan is quiet but keeps the drives cool. - the drive light are hardly visible when the front door is closed. - the transfer rates in RAID 1 and 10 are good. About 190Mb/sec (write speed) 200Mb/sec (read speed) in either mode.he Cons: - the power plug design is awful. One units plug was so lose, that it came undone soon as you touch it, or move the enclosure slightly. - the enclosure has a sleep mode build it, which puts the drives to sleep within a few minutes. We tried to disable it via the YottaMaster firmware tool, but the tool proofed to be useless. No matter what time you set or completely disable the sleep mode, the enclosure confirms the setting, but it doesn't change a thing. This was the reason we returned both, because our servers needs to run 24/7. (Besides the delay due to the sleep mode, the constant on/off will kill your hard drives.)

This is a product that seems like a great deal... until a few months later when it destroys all of your data. Two months in with no problems, I suddenly had two of the four drives completely fried. "That's odd," I thought. "Surely it must be the brand of drive I used." So after recovering my data, I rebuilt the RAID with four brand new drives from a different manufacturer, very highly rated. A month later, another fried drive. The common denominator is, of course, the RAID enclosure. Lesson learned, you get what you pay for. As you peruse more 1-star reviews you'll discover that more and more people learn the harsh truth months later. Buyer beware. I just dropped the RAID enclosure off at the electronics recycling in my area. Here's hoping this warning keeps other people from falling prey to the same fate.

...is it worth spending money on a cheap unknown RAID enclosure rather than spending double or triple the amount on a trusted brand? The short answer is yes... with caveats. I was looking for a RAID system to support video editing. I purchase this one by mistake actually; I meant to buy the 5-bay Yottamaster unit but messed up the order, and was too late to cancel. The advantage of the 5 bay unit is that you have better capacity efficiency in RAID 5, because only 1 out of 5 drives stores the parity data rather than 1 of 4; it's also theoretically a faster spec. However, when I asked Yottamaster whether the real-life speed was comparable, they said there is no significant speed advantage of the 5-bay unit. My concern was whether the speed and reliability of this cheap unit would match up with bigger brands. However, if you read the reviews of some of the known-brand units, people can be quite critical of the reliability. Unfortunately I won't find out how reliable this is until a drive fails, which could take several years. I tried pulling a drive while the RAID 5 system was online and in-use, but this unit doesn't support hot-swapping of drives, so I just got a beep and an error. Once I replaced the drive it re-initialised and came back online fine, apparently without loss of data. Obviously key to a RAID 5 system is how it copes with rebuilding data in the event of a drive failing; I wasn't easily able to test this. Speed-wise, I'm getting around 200MBps write and 250MBps read performance from this, which is more or less exactly what Yottamaster said I'd get. This is about 2-2.5x the speed of the same drives used standalone. However, it's not quite the 3x theoretical speed you might be able to eke out of RAID 5. To be honest, if you want a lightning fast RAID enclosure, spend more money. For me it's not a major issue, as I can edit from SSD if I want something quick (something like a T3 SSD is around twice as fast as this RAID enclosure, on my system which supports USB3.0.) Setup is not difficult; you set the DIP switches as per the manual (and sticker on the rear of the unit), use a pin to press the Reset button on the back, then power it up. I didn't read the manual to start with and hence missed the bit about pressing the button. If your unit shows up as just a bunch of disks, this is probably why. The unit is quite a lot quieter than I expected. There's an active fan in the back but with 4 drives and the fan running, it's pretty unobtrusive. The build quality is pretty much what you'd expect; the front door is a bit flimsy, and you can't properly see the drive status LEDs with the door closed. The plastic drive trays are perfectly functional but nothing to write home about. So if you're after a cheap and functional RAID system, I can't see too much wrong with this one. If you want high performance, then spend more money, as you'd expect really.