Yottamaster Defender 4 Bay Aluminum Alloy Hard Drive Enclosure

I had two portable back drives die on me. I needed something to ensure recovery that used more than one drive like the portables. So far this box is great. Mine has 5 x 1tb Western Digital Red drives setup in Raid 5. I’ve had these drives sitting around from a previous build. A day after setting up the raid and saving my data to it, it detected a drive issue. I replaced the possible failing driving and the box began to reconstructing the raid. It took a while but all is back to normal. I would highly recommend.

I'm reviewing the Yottamaster 5 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure,Aluminum Alloy 2.5"& 3.5" SATA HDD/SSD External HDD SSD Storage Enclosure with 80mm RGB Silent Fan.This is an attractive drive enclosure with easy to use drive trays.I use this with an Arch based linux distro for encrypted (LUKS) archival storage.I wish the fan was a bit quieter.

The product arrived and would not turn on. After looking over the device I noticed that the power connector to the circuit board was disconnected. While trying to remove the cover and reattach I realized that I needed to purchase a tool that I don’t have due to the size of the screw. It’s a little disappointing that I had to spend $30 to fix something that I wasn’t expecting. Once it was connected the unit powered up and is currently working. In the end I’d purchase again especially now that I have the proper tools.

Used with five 8Tb hard drives which formatted out to about 30Tb of usable space. I did have a problem with coping files from a 4 bay USB external drive to this raid array that one of them would time out and go off line. Coping the files first to my C drive then to the raid array solved that and the copy process went smoothly. I'm still in the process of getting all my files onto this raid array but so far all is working great even with the copy process taking 8 hours and longer from my C drive to this raid array. Copy speeds are good with about 150Mb compared to my other external single drives that copy at 100Mb or less speed. This is what windows report as copy speeds.

I was contemplating purchasing a Synology NAS to backup my media and photographic files but decided to buy this instead. One it was a fraction of the price and I needed to spend the money on buying a second 14tb Hard Drive.First thoughts. The case is aluminium with plastic/perspex sides, it feels well built and looks nice on my desk, the fan at the back is slightly noisy but not that extreme as many are saying. The coloured lights look niceThe front of the case houses the 5 HD bays, just slightly pull the lever to the left on the front and the panel springs open, pull out, mount the hard drive into the tray. I've just put 2 screws in and with the device turned on mounted it back in. There are small blue lights to indicate that a hard drive is present in the bayThe rear of the case has the USB, power connection and power button, when you switch off it takes about 4 or 5 seconds before the unit powers down. At first I thought this was a power faultI have 3 hard drives fitted, a 14tb, 4tb and a 1tb, the 14tb was instantly picked up within the DAS using Computer Management and quickly formatted itI then copied just over 8tb which included large photoshop files, RAW files, mp3, mp4 and software executables using FreeFileSync, it took just over 10 hours to copy it allMy only gripe is the USB and power cable, they are not long enough, the power cable is only just long enough to plug in from the desk to the floor. Have got a 3 metre kettle lead and 3 metre USB cable ready to purchase. Cables don't cost much so why cut corners and provide shorter ones. This is the reason for only 4 starsUsing the icon to power down the hard drives, you can power down all 3 in one go which is greatApart from the leads, am happy with the purchase