Syba 10000GB 5 Bay Tool Less Tray Hot Swappable 2.5" 3.5" SATA III RAID HDD External USB 3.0 Enclosure Windows MacOS SY-ENC50118

My purpose for this unit was to use it as "just a bunch of drives" and clean up the 6 external enclosures, usb hub and repurpose some old SSD's.I have no intention of swapping drives on a regular basis.I don't have experience with server grade trays and enclosures. So I can only assume server grade is more heavy duty and uses more metal in the construction.MY SETUPI am on a Mac and I attached the 8 bay via the thunderbolt 3 port which also acts as USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s), for what that is worth.Currently I have the unit fully loaded with three 8TB, three 2TB rotational drives & one 256GB mSATA & one 120SSD.I will eventually swap out the smaller SSD's & 2TB drives with larger when needed.My backups are handled with Goodsync Software - I run non-critical backup jobs monthly, or when I remember ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and automate the import data more frequently.The speed of my backups has not changed and may actually be faster since some of these drive were on USB 3.0 ports.Like I said I am on a Mac so if you are on PC your results may be different.TRAYS:I saw reviews about the cheapness of the trays and plastic drive clips. All I can say is for my purposes it is completely acceptable. The 3.5" drives clipped in very easily and held firm, for the 2.5" drives, you remove one of the blue plastic clips (the plastic is flexible enough and you don't feel like your going to break it when you pinch the clips) - then you place the 2.5" in place and use the provided screws to hold the drive to tray.The trays click into place with a nice clicky sound. Probably not like super expensive metal trays but I still has a satisfying click.POWER BUTTONS:I was concerned about the power buttons to the left of each tray, would I accidentally power a drive off if I bumped into it. But I was happy to find when the power in engaged the button pushes in and stays recessed and to power off you need to use your finger to poke it. So no worries about accidentally hitting power with your foot if the unit is under your desk, or your cat rubbing up against it. I took a photo of the buttons from the side, pictures from the front are deceiving and you can't see the recess when the button is pressed.SPEED:I tested all my drive speeds with Blackmagic Speed test Tool before removing them - then I re-tested after, and all were within fractions of percentage higher or lower (the test never seems be exactly the same on each run) so if a rotational storage drive was about 112MBs average write before the swap and after the new enclosure was 106-116MBs, I considered that the same.I do audio work and I kept my higher speed drives with my sample libraries, audio read/write drives etc. on their own usb buses. (I actually don't know how Apple shares the ports across my computer)But I wanted to keep the 8 bay for backups and my daily everyday coding files that don't need SSD or high speed drives. My fastest drive in the new enclosure is an old mSATA SSD I had lying around, it does 475/515MBs read/write.NOISE:My Intel iMac fan is so much louder when it kicks on. I wouldn't worry about the sound + there is a dial to slow the fans down to a crawl if you want it even quieter. I have the fans set full up and like I said earlier, my computer and my keyboard typing is much, much louder. I suppose if you need ABSOLUTE dead silence in a recording environment, your computer is already out of the room. I would still record in the same room with it and not be concerned unless it was a voice over with no other tracks. Then I would need to re-evaluate.SLEEP/WAKE:The hard drives seem to sleep and wake properly. I saw that this was an issue with a competitively priced brand so I gambled with this company instead. I have no sleep/wake issues.FINALAll in all I am pleased with the unit so far. It does exactly what it says on the tin. If you are an IT specialist used to working with full metal trays and that is important to you then you will need to pony up another couple hundred dollars and buy one of the big boy brands. For me this was perfect.I still thought it was expensive when I first started looking, until I dug deeper and the other name brands can be double this price. For my use I didn't need the name brands and besides my wife would've smacked me across the back of my head.

This drive enclosure is quite economical for an average person. Technically, you can setup an old computer as a home server for pretty cheap. That will take a lot more initial effort, more power and take up more space. This allows you hook up eight drives with ease. I really like that you can disable specific drives and the ease when taking out individual drives. The drive tray clips are actually quite easy to use once you figure it out.Of course, you trade the cost and ease by limiting 8 drives transfer speeds to a single USB. I'm fine with that as I'm mostly using it for archival purpose and limited use as home theater storage.I was having issues with random disconnects, especially when writing data to the drive. Reading was much better, and I rarely got disconnected when reading vs writing data. I saw some reviews that said USB 2.0 would stop the disconnects, so I used speed control on FastCopy to limit to 50% and that greatly alleviated my issue.Then I realized the likely cause. The cable that came with it was not very long, so I used a male-female 3.0 USB A cable to extend. After reading a bit more, it seems hard drive enclosures need a pure connection to avoid transfer issues.I swapped the two cables for a single 6ft USB A to B 3.0 cable. That fixed it. I get full transfer write speeds and I haven't had a disconnect since.Will continue testing and update this later.

All seems to work fine and construction seems solid. My only issue with this is that the plastic clips that hold each drive in its enclosure seem fragile and no spares are provided. It looks like I'll break one of these at some point putting drives in and out of the enclosure. Does anyone know how I could buy some spares?

I have had several external drives hooked to my iMac for various purposes, and for this reason, I've always been short of USB ports and really tired of all the power bricks for each drive. I had power strips and USB hubs and cables everywhere.This box is the perfect solution for that problem.I have mounted 5 bare drives in the 8 slots of my unit, getting rid of 4 USB port cables, an extra USB hub (that often gave me issues) and 5 separate power bricks. This thing cleaned up my computer setup immensely. The box is quiet (actually silent sitting on the floor next to my computer desk), compact, and in the month since I bought it, it's worked perfectly. No unwanted disconnects, and hey, it just works!It has a master power switch on the lower left corner of the front, to shut off power to the entire unit. And each drive slot has a switch to power down just that drive. This is very handy, since the drives are hot-swappable, and this allows you to power down only the drive you want to change out, and power up a replacement when you're ready. Within a minute or so of powering it up, the new drive appears in the computer's drive list. This also allows you to have drives "off-line", but ready to go at the touch of a button. All without dismounting the other drives in the unit.This enclosure is NOT a RAID device. Each drive shows up as a separate disk as if it were separately connected to the computer. You could create a RAID array with RAID software if you want, but the enclosure has no such capability built in. It's a JBOD, "Just a Bunch Of Drives," which is exactly what I needed.It's not a NAS, either. It's connected directly to the computer through USB (or a eSATA connection of you want), not to the network router. Its volumes can, however, be shared just like any other external drives within the capabilities of whatever OS you're using. It works like a charm on my iMac, running Mojave, and the mounted drives show up fine in Windows 10 running under Parallels.(If you do as I did and use external drives removed from Seagate's proprietary cases, you'll probably have to reformat them once, because the Seagate interface does something funky to how they communicate. This box has a standard SATA interface for each slot, so any bare SATA drives will slip right in and work like a charm.) It works just like a generic external enclosure for each drive.Yes, the box has a plastic bezel in front, but the rest of the case is made of sturdy steel. (It looks and is made much like a black medium-sized tower PC case. ) The drive trays are made of fairly light plastic with a small metal insert at the front where the latching mechanism lives. But the latches are easy to operate (squeeze from the sides), and the trays are easy to insert and remove. If you're just a bit careful with the trays when they're removed, they will work fine.It would be nice if Syba sold the mounting trays separately, but to my knowledge they do not. The drive mounting trays do fit into the box well, the latches work, and there's plenty of ventilation for the drives, with the high/low speed selection on the internal fan.The trays will work with standard 3.5" drives or 2.5" laptop-sized ones, and they are "toolless", since you don't need screws to mount standard drives. There are springy plastic fingers on the side of the tray that snap into the mounting hole locations on 3.5" drives. The trays have holes in the bottom (and they give you little bags of the proper screws to mount 2.5" laptop drives.)I did have one issue when I mounted a laptop drive. The back right side spring pin hit the side of the drive since there's no hole there, so when you try to install the tray, the spring pin sticks out and makes it quite difficult to slide in. I think that particular spring pin would probably end up broken off if you did that very often. But if I was going to use those drives often, I'd probably just snap that back pin off in those trays anyway, because even with only 3 of the 4 pins in place, the drive would be more than adequately secured. So, small problem, easy solution.My only small gripe was that there was no natural place to put labels on the front of the drive trays to indicate what drive is where. You get up to 8 drive slots, depending on the configuration you buy, and after a while, it can get clumsy to keep referring to an external key as to what drive is in what slot.I solved that by designing and 3D printing a small 1-1/2" wide by 1" high T-shaped name plate that slides into the cooling vent between the latches (there's plenty of other space for sufficient airflow). I put a printed DYMO label on each that's easy to change if I need to. Now it's easy to tell what's where.I did order a longer USB 3.0 cable, because the 1m/3ft. cable that came with it wouldn't easily reach to the back of the computer. When I test the speed on the drives, they are exactly the same speed as when they were individually connected before. (I didn't test the eSATA interface.)All in all, this is exactly what I needed. I'm very happy with this Syba drive enclosure.Update:10/2022I'm now using a PC vs. my old iMac, but this box is still exactly what I need. It works just as well with the PC as it did with the iMac.Of course, I had to reformat the drives, but that's because of the change of operating systems, not a fault of the device.The speed is based on the interface you connect it to. I'm. My case, it's USB 3.1, and the transfer speed to WD spinning drives is about 100-12MB/s.