Hard Drive Enclosure, CENMATE Aluminum 2 Bay RAID Enclosure with Fan for 2.5/3.5 SATA HDD/SSD with USB A/C 3.0, Tool Free, 4 Mode(Support RAID 1/0/JBOD/NORMAL)

The performance is absolutely brilliant on this twin RAID device. Very easy to set-up. Price is the best I found.My only quirk WAS that it didn’t seem to have any power management so the hard drives were constantly spinning. I think this is imperative with this sort of device as they tend to be left on constantly so I might have ended up buying one with this feature and selling this one on when I have the spare funds.However, after leaving a review stating this; the seller got in touch with me and offered a refund, and when I accepted they asked me to first try reflashing the firmware with a different EEPROM image that includes 'hibernate'. It now shuts down after 30 seconds of inactivity. PERFECT! Exactly what I wanted. Flashing program was unsigned Windows .exe file; I'm not sure if there's a Linux one available; with my drives being used for a Raspberry Pi NAS but in my case I was able to take the drive away to my Windows PC to do it.If you're looking for a USB twin SATA enclosure with or without hardware RAID function, BUY THIS ONE! It's absolutely brilliant and the seller is very helpful. Thankyou!!!Fan is very noisy as other reviews mention but its just a case of four Philips screws to take the back panel off and swap out the 50x50x10mm 12vDC "jet engine" that comes with the enclosure for a quiet fan that can be bought for about £5.99 off Amazon. Not a problem if your drives are kept somewhere the noise isn't a problem.Looks very nice. Excellent data transfer speed over USBC3.0 to my Raspberry Pi NAS. Highly recommended!!!

It is easy to set up and raid, simple to add drives, and works great on USB 3, all together worth the money.Having said that it looses a star for absolute lying.Its not got a silent fan its louder than my PC and my NAS drives combined, I can hear it 10 foot away, why on earth would they have such a lousy fan? its not as if a silent one cost much, Its pointless, and makes them look stupid, its going to be replaced obviously with a better fan, but why would anyone make such a big mistake for the sake of a couple of £?Great product as far as I can see, spoilt for no reason whatsoever by a cheap fan.

I bought this 4-bay unit a few days ago. So far, so good. It is performing well. Notes on installation of new drives (ie first time install with unformatted hard drives:I have a QNAP NAS to which I attached this Raid unit as an external Raid 5 drive. I used a USB socket. I bought 4x Ironwolf 4Tb hard drives. They are new, unused drives. Their form is std 3.5". They slot into the bays on this unit and clip into the blue plastic clips. NB: you must make sure the blue studs clip properly into the threaded holes along the side of the hard drive - the bay won't slide closed unless they fully inserted - you may have to push quite hard to get them in. Once all the drives are in place and the trays closed, connect the unit to your system but don't turn it on. Choose what raid system you want by setting the switches as explained in the guide and painted on the back of the unit. Once the switches are set, press the reset button in and hold it in. With the reset button depressed, power on the unit, holding the reset button for more than 10 secs (I held it for 12 secs). Release the reset button. After a while (a few minutes) the unit will be listed in your list of external drives with the description 'uninitialised'. Select format drive now and click ok to the loss of data warning. After several minutes the drive will show as available. I'm running mine on Raid 5 so, with 4x 4Tb drives, I get 12Tb of space with hardware redundancy of one drive failure.

Super easy to set up and the manual is pretty good. One quibble is that what both the manual and label on the device call Normal and JBOD configuration modes, I would call JBOD and simple spanning. JBOD (called Normal for the device) gives you two separately mounted drives. Simple spanning (called JBOD for the device) catenates the storage on the drives together to give you one large volume. Initially, I have configured the disks as RAID-0 (striped) to give me higher throughput performance than simple spanning, but with no redundancy against drive failure. My eventual use case is to make backups, for which I shall reconfigure the device with higher capacity HDDs as RAID-1 (mirrored) to provide redundancy. Obviously, RAID-10 (combined striping and mirroring) is not an option with only two HDDs.The noise level is not very intrusive and isn't a concern given how I will be using it. It might not be suitable for accessing media files and a NAS solution might be more appropriate in that case.I purchased the enclosure for £52, which I consider good value given its capabilities.

Does exactly what it says in the blurb. I had two spare hard drives from updating my Synology RAID machines. These have now been put to use providing personal backup for my wife’s laptop. Easy to set up and easy to use with the Windows laptop.

Bought this item to use as a storage and back up for my new M4 Mac mini. Sadly it was a poor choice. Constant errors as the drives disconnect. After a few hours only one of the bays worked and so got more errors. Looks good solid built so 1 star but sadly not fit for purpose. Others have said it's possible to get some software online but I shouldn't have to. If you have a Mac I would steer clear. Saying that it could be the same issues on a PC but I haven't got one to try it on.