Yottamaster5 Bay USB C RAID Enclosure, Aluminum 5 Bay 2.5/3.5 inch External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure Support RAID 0/1/3/5/10/JBOD/Clear,Mac Style - for Personal Storage at Home&Office [PS500RC3]

Ce boitier n'est pas du tout adéquat pour un disque 7200 RPM. J'ai installé un Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN004 et sa température a rapidement atteint 63°C, alors que ce disque spécifie 50°C max. L'absence de ventilateur, le peu d'espace entre les 2 disques, les supports en plastique et le peu de trous de ventilation de ce boitier font en sorte qu'avec 1x disque 7 200 RPM ou 2x disques 5400 RPM, la température monte trop pour un usage en continu.

First off, let me begin by saying that I really like this enclosure, so much so that I bought two of them, a 4 bay and a 5 bay, both are usb 3.0 non raid variant. I love the aesthetic on it, simple, sleek, and clean, with no shiny black plastic, nice front grill and simple, straight forward installation. As you can see from the first two pictures, they even stack nicely on top of each other.With that said, I'm also writing this review in hopes that Yottamaster will see this and actually do something about the biggest weakness with their products. What is the biggest weakness (at least for me)? The airflow in these enclosures. I deal a lot with airflow at my job, since I design computer cases, where optimal airflow is important, but balancing both aesthetics and function is even more so. I understand that it's hard to achieve that balance, but if we were to choose between function over aesthetics, function will come first. And this is the biggest downfall for these products.The enclosures come with a single 80mm fan at the back that sucks in air through the front and exhausts out the back. Even the bigger 5 bay enclosure still comes with an 80mm fan, while it could actually fit a 92mm. Generally this would be alright in the 4 bay enclosure, but a couple of issues make this a bad fit. First, the fan's airflow is already weak as is to keep noise down. Second, Front and rear vents are so tight, airflow is severely choked. Barely any air can come in from the front, and barely any hot air can escape out the back. I found this out after installing all 4 bays and seeing in my HDD management software that the temps on all 4 HDDs were much higher than those inside my server's HDD enclosure. The situation is made even worse during warmer days, where the bottom and top HDDs would hit 45C (near critical temps) because air would not flow around these two drives.So I decided to take apart my enclosures, remove the measly 80mm fans, and externally install my own custom fans. As you can see in the 3rd picture, I attached a 92mm fan to the 4 bay enclosure, and 120mm fan to the 5 bay. This are high static pressure fans that push lots of air while doing so quietly. I set it up so that air is being pushed into the enclosures from the back and out the front. Due to how constricted airflow is, it's better to push air into the enclosures rather than venting it out the back since this will just create a partial vacuum inside the enclosure and actually increase temps. After doing these modifications, the temps are so much better and even across all HDDs.As mentioned earlier, I hope Yottamaster will try and put some effort into improving the airflow inside their enclosures, because currently, it's just a hot chamber when used in standard setups. To potential customers reading this, please make sure the enclosures are kept in a cool, well ventilated area. Never place them near a heater or other source of heat, and definitely don't let them try to cool themselves in summer (they can't).

...is it worth spending money on a cheap unknown RAID enclosure rather than spending double or triple the amount on a trusted brand?The short answer is yes... with caveats.I was looking for a RAID system to support video editing. I purchase this one by mistake actually; I meant to buy the 5-bay Yottamaster unit but messed up the order, and was too late to cancel. The advantage of the 5 bay unit is that you have better capacity efficiency in RAID 5, because only 1 out of 5 drives stores the parity data rather than 1 of 4; it's also theoretically a faster spec. However, when I asked Yottamaster whether the real-life speed was comparable, they said there is no significant speed advantage of the 5-bay unit.My concern was whether the speed and reliability of this cheap unit would match up with bigger brands. However, if you read the reviews of some of the known-brand units, people can be quite critical of the reliability. Unfortunately I won't find out how reliable this is until a drive fails, which could take several years. I tried pulling a drive while the RAID 5 system was online and in-use, but this unit doesn't support hot-swapping of drives, so I just got a beep and an error. Once I replaced the drive it re-initialised and came back online fine, apparently without loss of data. Obviously key to a RAID 5 system is how it copes with rebuilding data in the event of a drive failing; I wasn't easily able to test this.Speed-wise, I'm getting around 200MBps write and 250MBps read performance from this, which is more or less exactly what Yottamaster said I'd get. This is about 2-2.5x the speed of the same drives used standalone. However, it's not quite the 3x theoretical speed you might be able to eke out of RAID 5. To be honest, if you want a lightning fast RAID enclosure, spend more money. For me it's not a major issue, as I can edit from SSD if I want something quick (something like a T3 SSD is around twice as fast as this RAID enclosure, on my system which supports USB3.0.)Setup is not difficult; you set the DIP switches as per the manual (and sticker on the rear of the unit), use a pin to press the Reset button on the back, then power it up. I didn't read the manual to start with and hence missed the bit about pressing the button. If your unit shows up as just a bunch of disks, this is probably why.The unit is quite a lot quieter than I expected. There's an active fan in the back but with 4 drives and the fan running, it's pretty unobtrusive. The build quality is pretty much what you'd expect; the front door is a bit flimsy, and you can't properly see the drive status LEDs with the door closed. The plastic drive trays are perfectly functional but nothing to write home about.So if you're after a cheap and functional RAID system, I can't see too much wrong with this one. If you want high performance, then spend more money, as you'd expect really.

I bought the Yottamaster 5-bay Type-C enclosure. But prior to purchase, I contacted the company 2 weeks before I bought the drive asking if they'd send me a copy of the drive's user's manual because I wanted to see the setup instructions in advance. No response. I went ahead and bought the drive, thinking if I have any problems with it right away, I'd just return the unit. So, upon receipt of the drive, I noticed that one of the plastic drive trays was missing its horizontal LED mechanism that transfers the light from the circuit board to the front of the tray (each tray has one so there are a total of 5 LED's on the board). No light being transferred makes the drive from the front look like it's not operational. So, I contacted the company again, this time through Amazon, thinking that they might respond to me in this instance. Amazon said I'd hear something in 2 days. I asked Yotta if they'd send me another tray as opposed to me sending the entire drive back to Amazon. Again, 2 weeks had gone by, no response, so I returned the unit- just so I could get another tray with a working light...sheesh.Some initial observations:1. The drive trays are cheaply made and obviously there's no quality control putting these enclosures together.2. Even though I had a another unit sent out, believe it or not, the plastic mechanism that displays the board LCD light, was noticeably dimmer. So, even though I was able to replace the tray, I have a much dimmer light in my bottom tray. So, their ability to produce consistent parts between units is questionable. This is a low-end quality drive.3. The original unit's on/off switch protruded about a 1mm from the case (nice). You can feel behind the unit and find the button w/o having to turn the unit around. The replacement unit’s switch was 1mm *inside* the case so to turn the device on and off either you have little fingers or you use a pencil or something. Another example of them not being able to produce consistent parts across their product line.4. The internal enclosure width is so tight that if you DON'T use their screws you won't be able to get the drive trays back in. I had standard screws that fit my drives but the heads, which should have worked, didn't. Their screw heads are flat and just that difference is enough to make the drive trays slide in. There is no guarantee that the screw threads will work in your drives, though, so be forewarned. I was lucky.5. The user's manual. It’s broken into two parts, an English portion and a Chinese portion and you can tell that the English portion was NOT translated by someone who speaks English- they appear to have used a translator of some kind and it reads like a 6th grader wrote this. Good luck with it. Thankfully, it’s not too difficult to set it up but don’t expect to get a lot of help from the manual.So, it's your call: if you're ok with dealing with a company that has no customer service at all and poor quality parts, take your chances and buy this drive. Right now I can't even say much about the enclosure hardware itself as I have only owned it for a couple weeks. I will come back in 6 months and update this review because if it survives with no issues during that period (or a drive fails and I'm able to recover), I can give it a better review based on the hardware's merits. They're still a fat zero when it comes to customer service.-----------------------Updated 11/29/20I said I'd be back in 6 months... it's actually now almost a year. I have this one comment: I have had 0 problems with the drive. It just works and it's very quiet. If my computer crashes, that drive is there mounted when I come back up. Always. Which is saying a lot considering I owned a 5-bay Terramaster D5-300 that gave me problems on a monthly basis. I still have not been in a situation where I needed to replace any drives (I have WD Red's in there at the moment and so I don't expect to run into any issues any time soon) so I don't know how difficult that will be, especially since I'll be on my own (no customer support). But, when that day comes, I'll be back here updating this review again and at least sharing what steps I had to go through to get the drive back up again. I upped my review from 1 star to 3 because of the surprising reliability. It'll probably never get much higher than that because of the poor user manual and no customer service- but we'll see.

I've had this enclosure running 24/7 for 6 months as of this review.The physical construction of this device is great. It's built from nice thick aluminum and the the front panel is thin metal with a nice aesthetic. The rear connectors and power button are easily accessible. The enclosure fan is decent, it fairly silent but doesn't blow enough air. As it stands the drives / enclosure get warmer then the ambient temperature by about 10-15 F on a cool day. They get much hotter on warmer days were the fan does almost nothing to drop the disc temps. This isn't much of an issue if you're running any type of active cooling near the enclosure.The main problem with this device is the USB-SATA bridge. It does write caching while reporting back to the OS that the data has been written to disc. This is usually not an issue, unless the enclosure and/or connected PC powers down unexpectedly. In my case it was a power outage and both powered down.The outage caused the File System on each disc to report that data had been written but it physically hadn't been written yet. The amount of data that was reported written was significant.Also, from that point forward the enclosure would only come online if I physically removed a drive, then powered it on. After the enclosure was powered on I then had to push the removed drive back in. If I don't do this the enclosure spins the drives, then the activity lights flash red for a sec and then never come on. Using this hack I can get the discs to spin and show blue.If you don't have any mission critical data in the enclosure this will work. Also if you have this and your PC connected to a UPS then you should also be OK. Otherwise tread carefully.