5 Bay RAID Hard Drive Enclosure, Yottamaster Aluminum USB3.0 5 Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure,Hardware RAID (0/1/3/5/10/JBOD/SPAN/PM) Desktop Storage 5 Bay HDD Enclosure for 3.5″/2.5″ hdd/ssd
Professional Grade Preferred Storage Solution(RAID 0/1/3/5/10/PM/SPAN/CLONE)
- Enterprise-class hardware RAID solution for creative workflows, project archives, and system backups where reliability and versatile performance count.
- With multiple universal drive bays for 2,5″/3,5″ hdd, easily configured in multiple RAID modes at the flick of an easy-access switch, Yottamaster Focus Series are built to seamlessly integrate with any work environment from high demand production studios to your home office.
- Take your storage capacity, performance, and data security to a whole new level.
Customize RAID Modes to fit your specific workflow needs.
Sleek Design with data security
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Vibration-absorbing foot
| Press to left
| More security
| Heat-dissipation
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7 RAID Modes,Optimized for every environment,the choice is all yours!
| RAID1 | You can mirror the drives with RAID 1 as a reliable backup for your important data; |
| RAID0 | You can stripe the drives with RAID 0 for optimal performance and maximum speed; |
| RAID3 | Or you could instead choose RAID 3 provides better data security in environments where continuous long files (like video editing files) are to be read; |
| RAID5 | RAID 5 provide complete data protection against disk failure while providing excellent speed and capacity. This is perfect for when you want to use a single storage products for both editing and backup; |
| Normal | Or choose Normal which allows you to see and use each disk independently.With five working days a week you can assign each disk to a daily backup to see and use each disk independently; |
| SPAN /JBOD | Or use SPAN to combine the drives for extra large storage capacities; |
| RAID10 | Combines data security of RAID 1 with high-speed read and write of RAID 0. |
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| HDD/SSD | 2 X 2.5/3.5 HDD | 4 X 2.5/3.5 HDD | 5 X 2.5/3.5 HDD | M.2 SSD | M.2 SSD |
| Speed | 5Gbps | 5Gbps | 5Gbps | 40Gbps | 40Gbps |
| Data cable | A to B | A to B | A to B | Thunderbolt 3 Data cable | Thunderbolt 3 Data cable |
| Function | Optimize your workflows | For creative workflows, project archives, and system backups where reliability and versatile performance count. | For creative workflows, project archives, and system backups where reliability and versatile performance count. | 40Gbps High speed read/write | 40Gbps High speed read/write |
| Interface | USB3.0 Type B | USB3.0 Type B | USB3.0 Type B | Thunderbolt 3 | Thunderbolt 3 |
| Dimensions: | 33.7 x 32.2 x 21.9 cm; 4.56 Kilograms |
| Manufacture: | Yottamaster |
| Origin: | China |
I wanted a stacking unit for my 4 hard drives I have sitting on my desk behind my screen. Could not decide between Yottamaster and Orico. Decided on Yottamaster 4 bay enclosure. When it arrived I was very impressed with the quality of the product – The whole case including the trays to hold the hard disks were strong and made of metal (not plastic) – a good solid job – well finished. Unfortunately when I screwed a hard drive into a tray and put it in the enclosure – the drive’s content did not show up on my PC – instead I got a message asking me to format it. Which meant I would lose all of my work and files on the hard drive.I emailed my problem to Yottamaster with ALL the details (via Amazon) and got a reply straight away. The rep explained that the fault was caused by my hard disk being partitioned and that I should remove it from the Yottamaster and reconnect it to my PC. Then I should back up all the files on it to another drive before removing the partition. I did this using a great free program called IM Partition Resizer and then after replacing the drive into the Yottamaster I formatted it and re-installed my files back to it. My PC found the HD and all the files were visible. I then installed my 3 other hard drives in the Yottamaster stacking Unit and all are working perfectly. Many thanks to the (prompt) helpful support offered by Yottamaster.
This review is for the 5 bay, non-raid version.
It’s a nice surprise to have an IT accessory that actually works well and doesn’t appear to have any flaws, especially a USB device.
I am using this USB drive bay to run a ZFS RAIDZ2 array, and have not had any errors, after transferring many TB of data.
I’ve got 3 1TB SSD (tested with 5) a 16TB WD and an 8TB WD in this. I’m happy that it works, seems to sustain decent data rates (although nothing > 300MB/s per-drive).
Bit of a mixed bag. Hardware is fantastic and very well made. Great kit for the price and unlike many I like having the internal PSU. I bought it to be a NAS. Yeah, I know, why didn’t I just buy a NAS but as a developer, most NAS processors are rubbish and I wanted something powerful but low of electricity bills. Also having the storage array separate from the computer means if you have a problem with the server you can just plug the DAS into your laptop to sort it out! My server is a Raspberry Pi 4B (see black box on top (luniker case – set up for USB boot) – box at the side is DVBSky USB DVB-S2 box for recording under MythTV). I wanted to have:
1) Little 40GB SSD as Pi boot drive (just old spare)
2) 6TB Seagate backup hard disk
3) 2 x 4TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives (RAID-1) as my main storage.
You cannot do that with the switch configurations. If you set (1,2,3,4) as (DOWN, DOWN, UP, UP) you get 2 x RAID-1 disks. Maybe somebody can figure out a way but I didn’t. What I ended up doing is just having 4 x JBODs and doing software RAID-1 by MDADM (OpenMediaVault on 64-bit Debian “Buster”). Yeah I know, you’re ot supposed to do RAID over USB but I’ve been using it for years and never had a problem. You just create Physical Volume/Logical Group/Logical Volume for each disk (in OMV) and they appear as “disks” you can use for MDADM. It isn’t ideal and the hardware RAID would be much faster. That was the point of buying the RAID version! In the future I might but two new hard disks (maybe 2 x 8TB), do 2 x RAID-1 and have the 4TB RAID-1 pair as the Pi boot + extra storage.
I just wish Yottamaster had thought about this more. The hardware is capable of so much more but the configuration method is rubbish. I’m sure it will be a great DAS and a great NAS using the Pi 4 (which is utterly superb with 64-bit (beta) RaspiOS) but not being able to use hardware RAID-1 now is disappointing.
I would recommend this but with big reservations. Your use-case has to be 2x RAID-1, RAID-5 or RAID-10. I would got down the path of having a Pi with a DAS again though.
Very happy with this little unit. Extremely easy to set up and get started (despite the fact the drive trays require old school screws rather than a neater tool-free solution). I have 4 x 4TB WD Red Plus drives in a RAID 10 array in mine – installed them in a few minutes and it was up and running in no time. Very quiet, decent build quality – I’m a happy customer!
I bought this to connect a few drives to my home ‘server’. It uses Ubuntu 21.04 and the installation went without a hitch. It was easy to install the drives into the caddies. The device is quiet and stays cool.
The specs for this item seemed ideal for me, but on reading the reviews, I was nearly talked out of buying one. There were many comments about the item going into sleep mode and taking time to restart. The Yottamaster website was at first difficult to navigate, but I finally found the page for this item, and found there were downloads for drivers and setup, including one to flash the device so it did not go into sleep mode. When the unit arrived, I flashed the unit and have had no problems at all. There is even a download for setting RAID in software, rather than hardware, which is far easier than DIP switches and reset beeps!
OK, this is not the most expensive device out there, not even the easiest to get working how you want it to…
But I tell you it does work not overly noisy, you can’t even hear the HDDs in it and I have Western Digital Red Pros in there which are apparently bad for noise, maybe I am just no too concerned about the noise of expect it.
It is plugged in to the back of my NAS and works exactly as it is supposed to.
Certainly cheaper than another NAS
Would I buy again, yes.
So I’ve got the non raid 5 bay version. Drives picked up very quickly. Cooler it’s not that loud and drives seems to work cool. Using crystal disk info and the smart smart seems to report fine.
The only downside not important to me is the software. The Yottamaster raid manager does not recognize the enclosure at all. I did not bother updating the firmware as it works fine for the needs I have.
Speed it’s average y only store big files and copying to 2 drives at the same time considering it’s the same usb bus seems all right.
When I first came across this FS5RU3 drive enclosure, I was uncertain of the actual colour of the case. I e-mailed the company to enquire as to ‘what shade of grey’ the case was, as well as a couple of other technical issues (such as whether the caddies were plastic or metal – they’re metal, with some plastic bits! – what speed the processors – plural! – ran at, how much RAM was incorporated and whether it was was expandable by the user or not.) I also pointed out that the 10% Discount code they offered through their website wasn’t currently working on Amazon.co.uk (although they claim that it ought to!) but sadly, to date I have not had a response from the company, YottaMaster.
When the substantial, very robust, thick ‘anodised aluminium’ enclosure arrived (courtesy of Amazon.co.uk) and was unpacked, the first small obstacle encountered was that the drive caddies couldn’t be ejected from the chassis. [It seems that the plastic catches don’t retract quite sufficiently – at least not without a little extra force being applied! – for the caddy to be ejected. These caddies are robust, with no sharp edges to the metal parts: only time will tell how long-lived they will be since, unlike some other NAS RAID devices, the drives need to be attached to the caddies which act like sleds, in order to be ejected. A small screwdriver and a collection of appropriate small screws to attach the drives to the sleds are supplied with the enclosure. The mounting holes for the 2.5″ HDDs and SSDs are on the underside of the sled, whilst those for 3.5″ HDDs are on the sides.
The FS5U3 enclosure can accommodate up to 5 SATA drives – be they SSDs or HDDs or a mixture of the two – each of up to 16TB, giving a total storage capacity of 80TB. The data connection for this model is through an ‘expanded’ Type-B USB 3.0 socket [Note: The description on the Amazon page incorrectly identifies this as a USB 3.1 Gen 1 connector] whereas the PS500RU (which is designated as “suitable for home/office users”) features a USB-C connector. The appropriate 1.1m USB cable is supplied, and both YottaMaster enclosures should therefore have a maximum throughput of 5Gb/s. Copying a large file from one HDD on my PC to a drive in the FS5U3 showed an average throughput of 128MB/s, which is suitably fast, if not blazingly so!
One reason I opted for the FS5U3 enclosure (as opposed to the newer PS500RC3) was the inclusion of a 240v PSU, which I personally find more convenient than the external 6.5A ‘power brick’ of the newer model. The internal PSU also enables a small fan (which is not entirely noise-free) which runs quite slowly inside the enclosure, keeping the air inside the cabinet moving, and the drives somewhat cooler.
The YottaMaster devices can operate in many different modes, from JBOD through the RAID series (1-5) but interestingly can also operate as 5 individual disks when set to PM mode, and they’re then not treated as a ‘spanned’ set. In this mode, if one drive were to fail, the remaining drives would not be affected unlike a RAID system.
If the drives are not accessed for a number of minutes – YottaMaster claim it’s 10 by default – then the drives (and the fan!) are allowed to spin down. They spin up again in just a few seconds if a drive needs to be read from or written to, and YottaMaster have a software download which allows the user to set this to ‘0’ – which suspends the sleep function – or to some other value to suit the user’s needs.
The FS5U3 appears to be quite happy operating with Windows 10; I have no means to test it with an Apple Mac or with Linux. Nor can I confirm the amount of RAM fitted, or whether it is upgradable. As for and the speed of the processors, I can only say that they appear to be adequate for the task they need to perform.
All I can say really is does what it says on the tin, moved 3 of my hard drives which were originally in solo caddys into this 4 slot boy and worked straight away, was worried about possibly loosing some data but luckily nothing lost, and easier storage gained 🙂
I was looking for a multiple bay drive enclosure to store my disk which held my plex libraries. When the enclosure arrived I simply added the disks connected the USB to my Nvidia Shield (my plex server) and all the disks were recognised. The fan keeps the disks cool and is quiet enough for home cinema. With the Shield as the main computer the drives did not go into sleep mode which is what I wanted for Plex.
This enclosure provides a neat solution and opportunity to reuse old disks that might have been retrieved from obsolete PCs or other devices. I used it to replace a Synology NAS that had good disks, but a broken power supply. Much cheaper than a replacement Synology.
A well-made, solid, easy to use enclosure. Currently using 2 out of the 4 bays, all working well. My only reason for 4 stars rather than 5 is that the cooling fan at the rear of the enclosure could be a little quieter. Otherwise, all good!
Very simple product to use:
1. Plug the mains cable straight in the back—no power brick, nice!
2. Plug in the USB C cable
3. Pull out a drawer and screw in a 3.5″ Serial ATA hard drive
4. Push it back in and repeat for as many as all 5 drive slots
5. Power On!
Each hard drive is mounted individually, directly to your computer. I’m on Mac, and this works great with my M1 MacBook Air running Big Sur. One connection: loads of storage! Just how I like it.
All my hard drives mount fine with their existing files all present and correct. Read and write performance is as fast as these spinning drives can go. Simple!
The hard drive box has a single cooling fan at the back which turns on and off with the mains power switch. Conveniently, this switch is on the same (left hand) side as my Drobo 5D so I could mount them vertically below my desk, as shown in my pic.
I’ve now had one of these units for about 3 weeks or so and it is used as USB3 attached storage on a Synology DS 218j NAS box on our home Cat5E network, and I’m reasonably pleased with it, as follows:
– It has “stayed alive” without much in the way of remote access issues, although it does appear to take some time to become available in the mornings after not being accessed overnight – but these delays could be down to either the PC’s or the DS218J – and then access to the folders & sub-folders on the 4x 3TB drives is almost “instanteous”
– it does reboot automatically when the power is switched OFF and then ON again, which was a critical issue for our use – wasn’t sure from the reviews whether it would do that as some of them indicated that it would have to be manually rebooted after the power is restored!
– the drive doors do close firmly and seem to keep the drives securely attached to the sockets in the vertical backplane.
– It did come with more drive-securing screws than were actually required -> means I have some spares
OTOH, I wasn’t too happy with the difficulty I had opening and closing one of the drive bay doors to get the caddy out, and then back in, because the catch was reluctant to release.
I like the complete silent feature if HDDs are not used
I liked the ease for fitting the drives. The options for using it as RAID drive or as independent drives are easy to understand and to set the switches. I am using the drives separately to back up two PCs on my network so don’t know how it would perform in RAID mode. The one feature I don’t like is the power switch is a soft switch. I made the mistake of powering the drives from a smart power strip so when I turn of the PC the drive turns off. Not a problem except it doesn’t turn on with the PC again, I have to press the power button which is on the back and not very accessible at present.
I currently have 4 of the 5 bays in use with two 12TB WD reds and two 10TB WD reds running as JBODs. I use this array for personal plex media storage, and the Enclosure connects to a Shield Pro 2019 that hosts the plex server. The Shield Pro 2019 has no problems interfacing with this enclosure and provides a stylish solution to my storage needs. The design is very modern, and each drive bay has a blue HDD LED indicator which isn’t at all intrusive or distracting. This thing sits next to my TV and I never notice it.
Replacing the stock fan was simple, I just had to remove a few screws at the back of the enclosure and the back plate comes off exposing the fan and fan header. With the Noctua fan installed I’ve yet to notice any fan noise! The only noise that comes from the enclosure is when the disks are spinning up which is to be expected. As to the temperatures, as far as I’m aware the drives are remaining cool and not overheating.
The only negatives I have with this enclosure are that the drive sleds are not toolless and instead opt for screws, which in my opinion is an antiquated way of mounting hard drives. And that the firmware does not allow you to disable sleep mode for the drives. If you buy the RAID version of this enclosure, I believe that the option is available but with this version it isn’t.
All in all I recommend this product, however in hindsight I probably should have bought the RAID version so that I can disable sleep mode for the drives.
The firmware has a BIG negative however, hence the 2 stars, in that only ONE drive can report SMART data for health monitoring. Other caddies, like the Orico allows all drives to report. Tried several SMART tools like Hard Disk Sentinel (see pic), Disk Info, etc., none can access all the drives. This kind of monitoring is essential to predict upcoming disk failures and help prevent data loss, and if this could be changed by Yottamaster, then I wouldn’t hesitate to give this product more stars. If a firmware update changes this in the future, I will update this review!
Update: Although Yottamaster couldn’t assist with a firmware update, the developer of Hard Disk Sentinel has created a version that works for this enclosure. Using Hard Disk Sentinel, I can now monitor all my drives SMART attributes and be informed of possible future failures. So highly recommend using this tool, if you need this monitoring.
Great raid enclosure. Fan a little on the noisey side to be honest.
It works perfectly fine with a WD 16TB Gold hard drive in JBOD mode. The build quality is very good, perhaps the drive bays could be better, but that’s about it. If you want a quiet DAS out of the box you will be
disappointed. But if you really want to, you could replace the fan or simply disconnect it at your own risk and no doubt voiding your warranty. Disconnecting the fan has worked fine in my case without any worrying temperatures to the inbuilt PSU and HDD. You’ll have to use a torx head screwdriver. Currently I’m only using a single drive, I have no idea how it would cope with 5, there would be far more stress on the PSU and less internal room for air to circulate.
This arrived today and was up and running fine with 4 disks (1 spare slot still) in about half an hour. The enclosure is very sturdy and one of the better looking ones I’ve seen. I’ve paired it with my Mac Mini Plex server and it seems to be running very well. The drive comes with everything you need, power cable, usb cable, screws for mounting 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives, even a little screwdriver if needed. Both sizes of drive mount with four screws to the sleds. Some people say the fan is noisy, and report issues with Mac OS X, but that’s not my experience so far (late 2012 Mini with Catalina). I’m pretty happy, a much tidier solution than lots of external drives.
The fan at the rear is audible but not irritating, more of a low hush. It seems to run at a constant speed and the air throughput is sufficient to keep the case cool. The trays are made from metal with mounting holes for both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives. They fit perfectly, plastic guide rails on each side prevent rattling in case of drive vibration.
The data connection is a single USB-3 Standard-B connector, a 1 m cable with USB-A at the other end is provided.
I haven’t done any real speed tests yet but it is noticeably fast. It happily accepts disk drives in any format: I have added NTFS, exFAT, HFS+ and as my standard arrangement ZFS formatted drives in any mix and providing the computer at the other end of the cable can handle that format, it will show up.
My preferred setup is two pairs of mirrored ZFS pools: in case a disk goes south, you just swap it with another one of equal size. Much faster than re-silvering a RAID array. There is a 5-bay version available which I would recommend if you want to go for a RAID 5 array.
My first unit has been running since January without a hitch. Very pleased with it.
This is actually a good little unit. I have 5 x 3TB Seagate NAS drive in it in Raid5 and I am getting around 250MB/s read and write connected to my MacbookPro. The thing I really like about it is it switches the fan off when the drives go to sleep so it is totally silent when not in use. Even when it is running it’s not overly noisy – I have it on my desk and it certainly isn’t distracting (although that is an individual opinion – others may be more noise sensitive!)
The only down side is there is no Raid software, so you can’t see what’s going on on the unit – but for the money I cant complain. The Orico units do have Raid software, but it does not work on Catalina 🙁
I use mine for storing movies and it will happily steam 4k files
I have been using this product for couple of weeks now and cannot complain.
it arrived earlier than expected, the packaging was great and worked out of the box.
The hard disk trays are using to remove and Disk’s can be mounted with little screws which has been provide (more screws than need which is great since they are small)
I connected to my Laptop first and the all disks mounted shows right-away without any issue. since I wanted to use as additional storage, I have connected the unit to my NAS (Synology) and all disk have been mounted and accessible throughout home network.
the unit is quite and goes to sleep mode if not used.
I highly recommend if you are looking for a multiple external disk holder with single point of USB connection.
I ordered this to replace my “Hornettek Enterprise 4x Quad Bay Hard Disk Drive” and I am please doing it.
this product is highly recommended.
I purchased this as it said the fan was silent. Although not excessively loud it is noticeable. For this reason I gave it 4 stars. I also have Hard Disk Sentinel Pro and it does not recognise the hard drives in the enclosure. I contacted Hard Disk Sentinel and they suggested a firmware update. I have been trying to find a firmware update on Yottamaster website. But I cannot find my model: FS4U3 on their site.
I am very happy with this,as a usb connection with 4 terabyte drives in it,drives are imeditely available and are quite fast from one drive to anoth ,both in the box thank you i can highly recomend this item
My main reason for purchasing this unit was that according to Amazon all the bays could be used in a RAID configuration, some other brands seem to limit RAID to two bays with the remaining drives used individually. I wanted to use the Yottamaster as a single large backup drive by spanning drives together to form a contiguous amount of space. I used some existing 4TB drives I had, in total linking all four together to form a 16TB drive (minus the usual overheads). My plan was to then use this large drive connected to a Synology NAS to backup photos, cloud sync data and movies I stored on that device.
There began my problems, I followed the manual to the letter, however put simply the manual is wrong. The enclosure by default has RAID disabled and all drives appear individually which is not what I wanted or paid a premium for. After multiple attempts to set the raid configuration I began to worry that power cycling my drives too frequently might result in damage so I contacted support and asked a question on Amazon. The manufacturer themselves responded which was nice (but not with a solution) however independently I found a site reviewing a different enclosure but one presumably using the same underlying hardware and with a better written manual. To that end this is the information you need to set the RAID configuration and what should have been written in the manual:
1. Power the enclosure off.
2. To clear the current RAID mode, push all the dip switches to the up position.
3.Press and hold the Set button. While holding the Set button, press and release the Power button to turn it on. As it turns on, you’ll hear one beep. Keep holding the Set button until you hear a second beep (wait for a proper beep–there are some electronic bits that aren’t the same). After the second beep, release the Set button.
4. Turn it off again using the power button.
5. Set the dip switches to the pattern matching your chosen configuration.
6. Press and hold the Set button.
7. Press the power button (while holding the Set button). Wait for second beep.
I’ll write my long-term evaluation after I have been running the enclosure for a while, hopefully trouble-free.