I've used this product almost every day for a year now. While at relatively inexpensive price, this product performs as advertised and keeps performing . It makes adding additional hard drives to your system a snap. Just hook it up, turn on its power, and it automatically works with your operating system to do the rest. Easy breezy. A major additional benefit it provides over the traditional method of connecting hard disks directly to the motherboard is that it, seems to me at least, to inherently protect the disks themselves from being damaged due to problems with the motherboard or accidental errors on my part. Read more
This will be used for expanding the storage of my home server. The drives won't be continuously spun up so heat shouldn't be an issue. I will add an extra fan to the lid if heat does cause a problem. You can set in Windows power management whether or not you want a drive to sleep if you don't want the unit going into standby mode. Also you can insert smaller SATA drives including SSD's in the unit but they won't have any physical support except the SATA connector plug. If you want something for continuous disk use I'd not recommend this because of the poor heat dissipation. Get yourself a nice RAID box on here instead. If all you want is something to store movies, pictures, music etc. to access occasionally then this is fine. Read more
2nd Edit Having turned off the disk sleep function the unit is performing much better than it was with the sleep function enabled. I've updated my review to four stars because the unit still has issues. I can just live with them now. They really should package the firmware update software with the unit or provide some other mechanism to disable it. Heads up Apple / Linux users, the firmware update only works with Windows. If you have a dual boot like I do, once you disable sleep in Windows it fixes it for Linux too. I assume that if you are an Apple user with access to a Windows computer, you can update the box's firmware with the Windows machine and you'll be good to go. Let me reiterate that the real issue lies in the unit's poor cooling mechanism. My fix for that was to remove the top & put a small external fan blowing upward on the box. See the included photo for more information. With the top on my drives were running very hot at 150+ degrees Fahrenheit. Running you drives that hot long term will significantly shorten your drives' life spans. Edited: After I wrote my review, I was contacted by the seller. She offered me a refund but asked me to try a firmware mod to resolve the drive sleeping issue by disabling it. She sent me a link to a site that looked really sketchy. I followed the link anyway and it turned out to be a safe site. After making the suggest mods to the firmware the box is much more responsive and does not lock all my drives up like it did originally. It works well enough now that I've decided to keep it. I'm leaving my review as 2 stars however due to the unresolved heating issue. And also because the seller instructed me to not worry about the heating issue since hard drives are meant to run hot. That is simply untrue. Hard drives are designed to run in a temperature range of 50°F to 122°F. When I checked the temperature of my drives at the time I originally installed them in the box the temperature was above 150°F. The only safe way to use the device is as pictured: with the top off and an external fan blowing directly on the box. Original post: This rig will overheat your drives. There is no fan for air circulation. When I first installed my drives, I thought to check it after about 30 minutes and found all 5 of my drives WAY to hot to touch. Running your drives this hot will significantly shorten their life spans. The only way the to use it safely is to remove the top and put a small fan in front of it. Additionally, the sleep mode sucks. The drives go into sleep mode within seconds & takes forever to wake back up. I wish someone would create a 5 drive bay like my old 4 bay Mediasonic pro box. Unfortunately for me 4 bay is the largest they make. All the five bays I've reviewed have serious issues. Read more
The cooling in this thing is an absolute joke. The fan might as well not exist. Looking in each bay, there are almost no holes and the ones there are blocked by the drive when inserted. If I hadn't got this on sale for a great price, I would return it. Don't even think about running this with the top cover on. If you purchase, make sure to have a fan nearby to point at the top of the drives. Doing this got my temperatures in an acceptable range. The good: Works with 5 drives and has reliably for a few weeks now once I setup an external cooling fan. The bad, this thing will cook your hard drives resulting in an early death. Just sitting idle my drives were in the mid 40-degree Celsius range. Any data transfer and they quickly got into the 50-degree range which is a no no for mechanical drives. Luckily, I had a spare desk fan that I rigged up to cool the drives. Read more
I have a media server computer that needs vast amounts of storage. I used this array to consolidate my four hard drives all from different manufacturers. It takes a few moments to spin up but they all show up and will accept all my converted media, backups from my computer and anything else I would need it for. I use the included USB 3.0 cable, while it may not be the fastest way to connect, I would prefer a USB-C the trough put is more than my current needs. The included power supply seems to service my mechanical hard drives with no issue Read more
Orico put together a great product. 5 drives in a single unit on a single power source. However the problem begins with a lack of sufficient air flow. Mechanicals drives by their nature produce a great deal of heat. When fully loaded there is a single fan that provides inadequate air flow resulting in premature drive failures. Additionally the lid is equipped with 4 MAGNETS. The last thing anyone wants near their mechanical hard drives is 4 magnets. Additionally the lid captures the heat put off the drives. This makes the fan's job of dissipating the heat that much harder. I would suggest instead of magnets they replace this with recessed nubs on the case and the lid to secure. And to have a vented opening in the top for heat to escape. Curious the case itself has venting holes that are on either side on top. But the benefit of this is lost when the included lid is in place. I don't have an issue with the asthetics of the drives so using without the lid is not an issue for me. My only concern operating like this is the potential accumulation of dust. Read more
This thing is fantastic. 5 drives 90TB storage - whats not to like. Easy setup and use. I know own 2. Read more
