CENMATE Aluminum Dual Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with Cooling Fan for 2.5“/3.5" SATA HDD/SSD with USB A/C 3.0, Support Hot Swappable, Daisy Chain Expansion, Tool-Free HDD Enclosure, DAS(NO RAID/NAS)

Easy to use and make use of my spare hard drives.

Good for what I needed it for. Didn't need a nas just something that I could put all my hdds in and use. The casing seems solid and mounting the hdds was easy,I did a mixture of 2.5 and 3.5hdds. however,the fan is seriously annoying and loud. The item description states"The 3.5 hard drive enclosure built in Aluminum-Alloy materials and 2 inch Silent Fans. Maximize the security of your data. The fan requires a USB or eSATA cable to be connected before it work. NOTE: Hard drives making noise during operation, it is not caused by fans. We have tested the decibel level of noise with and without the fan---nearly no difference in decibels. The noise is generated by the hard drive"This is simply untrue in my case. Not only does the fan come on constantly even when not plugged into a computer but the fan is really loud. I tested by removing all HDD bays and it was definitely the fan noise. I've since removed the fan and at this point only now can I here HDDs spinning.So with that in mind,I think it's a good item for the price but I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you know what you are getting in to.

So pleased with this. Really easy to set up, comes with very clear instructions. Not too noisy.

I recommend very easy installation

I don’t like how that for the price it doesn’t have a basic temperature sensor in it so the fan is only on when it gets past a set heat, it actually has the fan on all the time which is irritating and when I turn my computer off the drives still seem active too so I hope it’s actually stopping the drives at least to the point that they won’t get damaged if accidentally knocked and I think if it doesn’t that’s not acceptable for the price, I say this as the discs still sound like their spinning and the drives make noises when I use the switch at the back of the enclosure after I’ve turned my computer off, I’m not sure if I trust them to be hot swappable as wouldn’t it damage the drive if I took it out wail it’s still spinning ? Someone please feel free to politely correct me if any of what I said is incorrect, it’s just how it seems from my experience. I would still consider getting another of these in future if I need one but I’m still worried about if it actually stops the drives properly or not on shutdown?I would happily add another star if someone can proof to me that they do protect the drive from damage when shut down but until then I’ll be unsure about it based off of how they sound to me on shutdown.

I bought this for my son, he says it is fine.

I would give this five star but the fan is Very noisy

Not quite sure what they meant when they said this was a 'tool free' enclosure. You definitely need the little screwdriver which is thoughtfully provided.TLDR. Long story short I used this to simultaneously mount and then format a new and previously unformatted SSD, a previously used exFat SSD and finally an oldish (Apple) APFS formatted SSD. All working perfectly and simultaneously, that exceeded my expectations.This review will only consider SSD drives as that is all I use.1: Glance at the really small manual.2: Realise that they have supplied two sizes of mounting screws for your drives, use the smaller threaded ones for your SSD.3: Actually look at the manual and then remove the right hand plastic strip from the cradle. Voila the cradle works.4: Connect it to your PC, in my case a MacBookPro M2. I used the supplied cable to plug into a Thunderbolt 4 (USB C) port. All the drives popped up and after a few seconds of flashing settled down to a steady state.5: Speed is fine, read and write speeds are excellent. I'm not using actual figures because there are too many variables but I didn't feel that this unit was underperforming. Remember this isn't a RAID.6: As everyone says this is a noisy device. Well yes and no. It's noisy because the cable is so short and so the box is very near.7: I took the back off, unplugged the fan, reassembled and the noise went away. Shock! /s8: What about overheating? This is a fairly large box with 3 low powered SSD's in it. If I did think it was overheating I'd just take out any drives that I wasn't using. I didn't notice any appreciable rise in temperature. I guess this is helped by the power supply being external.This box has found a place in my workflow, I just need a few more cradles.UPDATE: I just bought a used iPad pro with USB C connectivity. Plugging straight into the iPad all the drives were accessible via the Files app. Excellent news.