Yottamaster 5 Bay RAID Hard Drive Enclosure, 150W Aluminum USB3.0 RAID Enclosure for 3.5 & 2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD, Support 90TB(5x18TB) Direct Attached Storage DAS RAID1/5/10/JBOD/CLONE [FS5RU3]

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.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm having a nightmare of a time with this enclosure. Before you comment, I did follow the arcane instructions to disable the sleep feature of the firmware. However, it seems to be impossible to tell if this feature is in fact disabled or not. There is no indication that the feature change was successful after 'clicking ok' in the last step. There is no indication of firmware being updated or anything.My personal setup is with Ubuntu Server 24.04, using all five drive bays in a ZFS Pool. At first it seemed to work just fine, though transfer speeds seemed to be a bit on the slow side. I have confirmed that it is configured to use the USB 10G capability, so it should not be an issue.My problems started when trying to replace a drive in the ZFS pool. During the re-silvering process other drives started to spontaneously drop off of the pool and fail. I finally got the new drive resilvered after several attempts, but then my pool had one other drive that became unavailable. I scrubbed a couple of times and had many, many errors (which I have never seen before in this pool). It finally completed a scrub with another drive becoming unavailable.Looking at both these drives with smartmontools, it appears they have experienced some DMA errors, possibly associated with ICRC LBA which might imply cabling, or the backplane (in this case, the enclosure).I'm currently trying to replace one of the drives that went unavailable during the initial resilver, in the hopes that I can salvage this ZFS pool. I've reached out to Yottamaster, but haven't gotten a response yet. Thus, I'm here in the review section to see if I can get some attention. I don't want to buy a different enclosure, as I know most are based on the same chipset... but I might have to if this one gives me this much trouble.