Yottamaster10Gbps 5 Bay USB C Hard Drive Enclosure Daisy Chain, 150W Aluminum 3.5" HDD Enclosure for 3.5 & 2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD up to 5x18TB, Non-RAID DAS Daisy Chain 270TB Storage Expansion[FS5C3]

I purchased this enclosure to replace a 3-year-old Sabrent DS-4SSD enclosure that's connected to a Raspberry Pi which I'm using as a NAS. The Sabrent was still working great, but the fan was getting loud and not blowing much air any more; it wasn't that quiet to begin with, actually. Though that enclosure was trayless, that might be the only advantage over this one. This one is very well built. It's lightweight but still feels very solid. The fan is silent as advertised, and the installation is trivial. I'd highly recommend this enclosure to anyone in the market. In addition, the customer service is second-to-none! Every email I've sent to them, and I've had several questions before andafter purchase, has gotten an answer within a few hours.Perhaps the only downside to this enclosure, as others who have also wanted to disable the sleep function have already noted, is the lack of clarity in doing so. For clarity, here are my instructions:1. When you visit the Yottamaster downloads page, there are two downloads that look like they could do the job. They both might, but the one I ended up using after being instructed by Yottamaster customer service was the rar file, not the zip file: Sleep Time Setting - Firmware Update for FS4C3 FS5C3.rar. You may need 7Zip or similar to open this if your version of Windows doesn't yet have native rar support.2. This package actually requires installation; you can't just update the firmware without installing the application. So, run the setup program inside the rar file.3. You'll also need the firmware, the .bin file, inside the rar file. I copied it to my desktop for easy retrieval later.4. Very important: you must have a drive in the enclosure before you update the firmware. Otherwise, Windows won't detect it, nor will the firmware application. Customer service suggested I back up the drive before doing this, too, just to be safe. Once the drive is installed, connect the enclosure to power and to your computer's USB port. Make sure you connect the cable to the "main" port and not the "hub" port on the enclosure.5. Now, open the application that you installed, VL715MPTool. A little pop-up should come up showing that the enclosure is connected. If it doesn't, it didn't detect your enclosure.6. In the tool bar, click on settings.7. In the settings window, click on open file in the firmware section. Navigate to the .bin file that you extracted from the .rar archive, and click open.8. Back in the settings window, click OK.9. Now, click the run or auto-run button. If you don't see the run button in the toolbar, you can find it in the functions menu off of the menu bar. Or you can just use the shortcut key: ctrl+a.10. If all went well, the pop-up window should show that one update was attempted and one update passed. You can now close the application and begin using your Yottamaster enclosure without the drives going into sleep state.

I bought this to house 5 SSDs for a NAS Mini PC. Unfortunately when looking for a DAS with 10gbps USB ports and 5 bays, there's not a ton of choices. The good news is once I got it set up and worked through the quirks, it's actually working really well and I'm happy with it.In terms of the quirks:- Sleep mode: The sleep mode that it ships with is absolutely awful and problematic. If you don't write to the disk periodically, the disk is put to sleep, which results in long stalls for the drive to wake up. Sometimes the drives fall off the USB bus instead of waking up. To disable this sleeping behavior, you must use a Windows-only tool to flash firmware onto the DAS. Not only do you need Windows, but the instructions are fairly vague, and the tool is not very intuitive. You have to click a few extra buttons to flash each of the 5 bays' USB to SATA controllers, which by default it doesn't do. If you can work through all of that, the sleep issue can be resolved- The DAS appears to cache the partition table and there's no way to clear it without hot plugging the drive bays or cycling the power to the DAS. I tried multiple different hdparm/sdparm commands to no avail. So if your use case involves needing to remotely repartition the DAS, this may not be the device for you. But luckily I just needed to initially partition all the drives.Other than that, it's been stable and survived several ZFS scrubs, overall throughput with 5 SSDs is around 1000MB/s.

The connectivity randomly drops and the sleep function can’t be disabled after downloading the firmware update tool from their website. The performance is alright but too pricy for what it offers. Heat was well managed with one fan in the back, but the controller seems very unusable if you are going to use it with proxmox or zfs, the firmware updater didn’t work for me at all.The drive continuous to click a ton when it’s disconnected from the computer, it’s like the drives are checking for something with nothing attached to it and it doesn’t stop for 10 minutes or so.

I am very happy with this purchase. I am using the Yottamaster 5 bay RAID enclosure as secure place to store my raw videos for my Youtube channel. This is valuable media to me and I feel very secure. I purchased 5 10tb drives to use in the Yottamaster and now have 40tb of protected data (I also use an online back up company for ultimate security). I use Premier Pro to edit from the enclosure as well and find the Yottamaster to be VERY perky and responsive with fast data transfer. It also has a very attractive and professional appearance; much better looking than the stack of single USB back ups drives that used clutter up my desktop. The setup for this enclosure is SUPER EASY. It literally requires 1 min. The documentation may be minimal but just follow the given instructions EXACTLY to setup.