Mediasonic PROBOX 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure – USB 3.0 & eSATA Support 18TB HDD (HF2-SU3S3) 2022 New Chipset

Bought this to house 4x SATA drives from a broken PC. Really easy to assemble and place the drives, and no problems accessing them once seated. Intructions are fairly idiot-proof as well.

The unit itself seems good BUT the inserts for 2.5" disk are special and expensive. Each is 11.00 odd so that needs to taken into account when you buy

Runs way too hot and fan noise is unbearable. Sitting on a wooden desk out of sunlight and well away from any heating source at idle WD 8TB Red NAS drives are cooking at over 60 Deg C. Very poor airflow design inside the chassis leads to the 80mm fan running like the radiator fan on a car on a hot day Other than that, great transfer speeds even in RAID 1, easily achieves 150Mb/Sec for write when transferring large files. Then it gets hot and bothered after a couple of minutes and fan kicks in and never stops until powered down.

Instructions are note extremely clear and it's doesn't appear to have any ability to check for bad sectors before using a drive.

Don’t bother. Cheap wobbly construction and materials. No international power adapter (US only). The fan is the loudest I’ve ever hear on any HDD enclosure. It’s so loud It’s unusable. 0 star product.

I got this to declutter the shelf where my home media server lives. Instead of having 4 USB drives sitting on the shelf I now have this one box connected via USB-C to a mini-PC with no internal storage beyond an NVMe SSD. It's very quick and works perfectly well but does NOT support hardware RAID. One could make a software RAID using Windows 10/11 Professional, note that the specs state this enclosure does not work with Linux. I have not tested it with Linux. The sync button is interesting. With sync turned on the enclosure powers up and down with the computer to which it is attached but will not recover from a power failure, that requires a human intervention to push the power button on the front. I cannot really fault this enclosure, for the price it is a great deal.

Bought 2 of these, one to serve as it's intended purpose and the other as a hardware backup should the first fail. The main unit has been in coninuous operation (i.e. 24/7) for over 2 years now without any issues. I initially tested out various scenarios for recovery - what actions to take if a drive or hardware fails with a bunch of small drives before setting up the 4x16TB drives in a RAID-5. For anyone interested: Device Failure 1. Connect the new unit to a computer. This is WITHOUT any hard drive in it. 2. Turn the unit on and set the same Raid mode as you had before. Hold Mode until RAID indicator flashes Press Mode until correct RAID level indicated. Hold RAID confirmation button until unit turns off. 3. Turn the unit ON, WITHOUT any hard drives in it. 4. While unit is ON, insert the old set of HDD in the new unit in the same order as you had before starting with Drive 1 at the top. 5. Wait for the unit to recognize the old Raid setting HDD Failure: Device powered on: (or if device is off) • HDD Error – Red • Rebuild – Off • HDD Status – Off 3 blue, 1 off • HDD internal indicator – Red 1. Remove failed drive 2. Insert replacement 3. Turn on if device was powered off • HDD Error – Red • Rebuild – Red • HDD Status – Slow Flashing Red/Purple 3 fast flashing Purple 1 slow flashing Red/Purple • HDD internal indicator – Red Takes about 5hrs / TB When complete HDD Error, Rebuild, and internal Off.

The Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 works as advertized. The unit I received is the new model supporting 24TB (6x6TB). Since I am using both 3TB and a 6TB I can say it works for this size drives. The US3, ESATA and power cord are all 1 meter long (39 inches). If you need longer cables the power cord can be replaced by any old PC or monitor 6 foot cord. As for ESATA the official standard maxes out at 1 meter. So, if you need a longer interface cable, you can get a USB3 cable up to 15 feet, the maximum allowed by the standard. The unit does not manipulate the data, so the drives can be freely inside a PC if need be. If you intend to populate the unit with drives from external drives like the “My Book” you will need to transfer the data from that drive to some other drive before using the bare drive since these are specially encoded by their controller and should be reformatted for use in the Mediasonic. If you use the ESATA interface, you can dismount drives on an individual bases like you do for USB drives. For the USB interface, the drives get grouped under one group name, which means they can only be dismounted as a group. Windows explorer sees the drives as individual units in both cases. The speed is dependent on the slowest link, USB2/USB3/ESATA2/ESATA3 interface and/or drive, so it will vary. As for the insertion or removal of drives it’s easy.

Awesome case and works great for either SSD or mechanical drives. Highly recommend