SABRENT 10-Bay USB 3.2 Gen 2 SATA Docking Station for 3.5” HDD/SSD, 10 Gbps USB-C DAS, Tray-Less Hot-Swap, Aluminum Enclosure, Dual Cooling Fans, Individual Power Switches, No RAID (DS-UCTB)

I picked up one of these on sale. I was replacing my old Drobo 810n and wanted at least 8 bays and USB 3.2 for 10Gbs. I run a 10Gbs home network, so I wanted to ensure I was not bottlenecking there. It's connected to a Mac mini, and I created a RAID 5 on it. It's using 10 x 8TB 7200 RPM drives. This has been running for 22 months now, no drive failures, good cooling, good bandwidth. I've had zero issues. I ended up finding a second one on sale for $300, and it's now backing up the first.Unlike some other USB DAS's, it's reporting all the SMART data back to the Mac (I just got a warning that one of the drives through it's first error). For staying cool, fan noise isn't an issue. The price is a bit high, compared to 8 bay systems, but if you can find it on sale, it's quality kit. I also have the 5 bay SSD USB 3.2 bay, and that has also been rock solid, and is much more reasonable price.

I recently upgraded my Linux workstation to the latest Devuan. I have three large media drives (14TB) which I use for my home cinema (ripped dvd, bd etc via Kodi). The thing about those hard drives is, they are loud when running, and I am sensitive to hum, and the workstation is right next to me all day long. So I generally like to keep the drives asleep (spun down) using hdparm. That worked previously on Debian Stretch, but it no longer works on the latest stable, if I want to have utilities like k3b and rhythmbox then they also pull in udisks2, which wakes my internal hard drives up every few minutes. So aside from removing udisks2 and doing without k3b, the only way to fix this was to move the drives to an external enclosure.Most of the enclosures out there seem to either be really cheap and simple, and they literally toast your hard drive due to lack of adequate cooling; or else they are high-end NAS with their own Operating System and networking. Which you obviously pay for, and I really don't need all that. I just want an enclosure, connecting via USB 3, with good cooling.I tried a different brand unit initially by Orico, which worked fine but the drives ran very hot. So I sent that back and looked further, and found these ones by Sabrent. Encouragingly, when I searched for "cool" and "hot" in the reviews, most people seemed to say that it does have adequate cooling. And it also just "gets out of the way".Now I have used it for a couple of days, I can confirm this is probably the best drive enclosure I have ever used. It is made of metal, very solid, which is refreshing (the Orico, for example, had plastic trays). Insertion of the drives is simple, if you're careful (I read one review that talked about breaking the door latch mechanism because they pushed the drive in too much before closing the door, apparently you leave 1/4" and then let the door closing do the rest). I found that the doors have to be pressed a bit more to get that final "click", otherwise the latch is kind of loose. But once the click happens, just a little one, it's solid.I really like the power button for the individual drives. I agree with others that perhaps it would be better if the default upon powering up would be to power on all occupied bays, but this doesn't really affect me much. I usually keep the drives off anyway, except when in use. The power buttons allow me to power down the drives after I am done watching TV. I unmount all the drives (single script does that quickly) and then manually go through the buttons. You have to press for three seconds each one, but that is a minor hassle. My only minor niggle is that the power buttons are black on black, so it can be hard to find them in a dimly lit room.Basically this thing seems to work, and it's fast, relatively quiet (I am sensitive to noise, and I don't really hear the fan at all - much more noticeable is the hum from the drives themselves, which can't be helped). And it works with Linux. It just... works. Does what I want, nothing more, and looks good on the desk, and feels solid. Very happy! I hope they keep making this one and don't mess it up with some stupid redesign down the line, as many companies seem to do these days.I can't speak to any issues with using more than one drive at a time, as some others talk about. However for my use case, I am generally only using one at a time anyway. I also use one of the bays for a backup drive, but even then, it's the only one being used when I do that. So all seems well, very satisfied.

I currently own 2 of the SABRNET 10 Bay enclosures. One enclosure I am using 10 8TB drives and the other is 6TB drives. I had migrated off a very old legacy RAID 5 parity array. I needed something simple and self-contained within a Windows 11 Pro environment. Although not the best the Microsoft Storage Spaces meets that requirement. The drives are easy to install and with Storage Space, not the most user-friendly interface, was able to allow me to virtualize the drive array into something similar to a thin RAID 5. Yet Microsoft doesn’t call it RAID. The now storage pools hold a bulk of multimedia and data. It’s been 3 months now and things are pretty smooth. The one piece of hardware I was very cautious of was the USB-C interface. The enclosure is a USB-C 3.2 interface, and I have both plugged into a ROG Crosshair x670E Hero motherboard which has two 40GB USB-C interfaces. So far everything is running well. Also, the drives are trayless, which I was also skeptical but it really works for now. Since performance is not my priority storage is what I need I have not yet encountered issues to think it’s running slow. I have set up a simple Apple TV stream through iTunes on windows and shockingly its been working pretty good. I can stream from my other Apple TV devices.

I bought this drive for data transfer to old hard drives for extended cold storage. Insofar this works well except for a few caveats:- You cannot individually power down each HDD via hardware, only via software. This isnt inherently bad, but not all drives handle ejecting the same way and you do not want to move a drive while it is spinning. This is an explicitly stated feature though, so I'll give it a pass. I would like to see this in a future revision though.- Disconnecting one drive will disconnect the other. This is explicitly not hot-swappable. When copying files to one drive be sure to not remove the other or it will remount that still connected drive. This is pretty frustrating and my main gripe with the device. I expected to be able to swap drives in and out as needed, this is not the case.- Speed is acceptable, nothing crazy. I get about 80MB/s transferring files to my HDD, pretty decent so no complaints there.- Construction is good, the drives feel secure so long as you are careful upon first connection and dont wack them.Overall it does what it says on the tin save for the non-hot-swappable part and the non hardware controlled power. For the price though it is what it is, I'd pick this up if you're only gonna use it once or twice per year for cold backups like my use-case. Hopefully it holds up over time!