ORICO 5 Bay DAS Hard Drive Enclosure USB 3 0 for SATA 3 5 inch SSDs HDDs Bracket-Free

Simple setup (as others indicated for 5-bay model PM=Normal/Clear), took 10sec for initial set up and even less for RAID5. Nice aluminum chassis which stays cool, compact, VERY quiet and with fast data transfer. I've been using it for about 2 weeks, so can't comment right now on reliability, but no complaints so far. No need to reboot it if I shut down or restart the PC it is connected to. Based on my experience to date I would recommend it as a good product, both price and quality. Read more

This review is for the five-bay enclosure model number 9858RU3. Setup was a little bit finicky at first and the Orico RAID Manager software reported that one of my drives was disconnected when I first ran the software but I think that was due to two of the drives having been used previously in a RAID1 array. The included instruction book is a bit sparse on info and refers to a PW switch. Just ignore those references if you have an enclosure that holds more than two drives. You really need to download the Orico's RAID Manager software to get the most out of this enclosure and get your RAID configured properly. Insert your drives, set the switches on the back of the enclosure to the config you need, and then hold the Reset switch for ten seconds when you turn on the power. Make sure all the drive bays show a blue light. Then run the RAID Manager software and ensure that there are no error messages. Then select the RAID level you need and press the "Apply" button. Once that's complete the software will ask you to reboot your system and then you can partition and format the array. Noise level is minimal. My enclosure sits behind a seventy inch TV so I can't hear it at all. The enclosure was heavier than expected but that's a good thing because it's all made of thick aluminum except for the latches on the drive bays doors so it's definitely durable. I'm using four 8TB drives at the moment for a twenty four TB array and have a fifth drive on the way which will give me thirty two TB's of storage once the new drive arrives. I did some benchmarking and I'm getting two hundred and ten MB/s sequential reads and one hundred and ninety two MB/s sequential writes, so it isn't the speediest drive array out there but that's due to the USB interface being a bottleneck. If you need speed, get a dedicated RAID PCI express card instead. This enclosure is a good value for the money. It's cheaper than many four bay enclosures that I considered with the same functionality. Read more

Extremely easy to set up and use, is actually as quiet as claimed. It’s an excellent value. Read more

Great DAS! Excellent purchase if you're looking for an easy storage solution upgrade. Works great every drive shows up as its own separate drive and can be accessed separately. Transfer speeds are great. I use this for the drives for my own media. Build quality is good nice and sturdy alluminum. installation was easy plug in power cord and usb cable plug into PC and slide in drives before turning it on. No noticeable bottleneck when using the drives in to stream my personal media. Read more

The unit itself was well constructed. I liked the ability to open the bay and slide in a bare drive. No tools required. The drives stayed cool. The main drawback and what led me to return it was how slow it was when accessing more than one drive at a time. Read speed topped out at 160MB/s using SoftRaid. Write speed started at 100MB/s until the write cache was full in about two seconds, then dropped to between 15 and 22MB/s with the drives chattering like crazy the entire time. When I had it directly attached to my pc without softraid, I found that if I copied a file to a second drive while a copy was in process to the first, one of the copies would stop until the other completed. I feel that this is related to the poor performance with or without SoftRaid. I am now using a terramaster d4-320 and have attached it to the same computer, sharing files over the same network. Write caching is set the same as with the item I returned. Now read speeds over the network are between 180MB/s and 220MB/s (500 from device to server, constant). Write speeds are identical and do not slow down. Better yet, there is nearly not so much chatter from the drives even during extended writes. The drives will last longer. Read more

Not a bad drive but after 8 months one of the bays stopped working. And if I put any drive in it the entire enclosure stops working. It took a lot of trial and error to figure that out. Read more

So far, excellent. Fan is a little noisy. Performance is as expected. Beefy power supply. Like the trayless design, easy to swap out drives. Read more

I purchased this to set up on a computer as a direct-attached storage device on my home network. Right now, I have it configured with 5 - 4 TB hard drives, which barely scratches the surface of the total storage capacity that this enclosure offers. One of the good features of this enclosure is that it provides many different RAID configurations, which, depending on how the RAID is configured, will help prevent data loss. The only issue is that in a RAID 5 configuration with WD Red HDDs, the data throughput is slow, but since I am using this as a backup solution, it isn't a big issue. There isn't much fan or drive noise either. I like the fact that the drives are installed in tool-less cages and slide right into the closure. However, the cages feel a little flimsy. But they slide right in and lock in place. The only issue I encountered was that when attaching the enclosure to the computer it was intended for, I kept accidentally flipping the RAID switches on the back of the enclosure. This would take the drive out of RAID mode. Keep your fingers clear of the switches in the back when placing the enclosure. Read more