5 Bay Enclosure Support Daisy-chain

I've been replacing the big old desktops, towers, and rack-mounts with the small brick computers. They're much more capable, quieter, and lower-power than the old boxes. BUT what about the data on servers? This allowed me to pull the drives from the old servers and connect them to the new "tiny box". USB-3 makes data access reasonably fast, and the transition was very smooth. Power consumption is greatly lowered, so the computer room is cool now without AC. Storage capacity is the same as the old servers, with vast speed and performance increases. It made a great conversion and utility bills went down too. Win-win.

Update: New unit worked. Disks showed up and smart info was reliable unlike before. Existing Data was accessible. I'm guessing the used one I originally received had failed. It's only been running an hour, but is a night and day difference so far. No clue about the disks going to sleep, or the stories I keep hearing about needing firmware updates. If I experience any issues I'll report back. Right now I'm just running two disks mounted. However I plan to do a software raid or zfs or something. Added 3 stars. The screws are different, better. The carriages are metal on the new one, and I'd swear the old ones were plastic. I rsynced 5.2TB onto each disk, then compared them. Sustained reads on two drives was around 200MB each. The entire usb bus reset while doing that load test (a compare).....Two reads on two sectors, had issues on one drive before the reset. A second read after the rest was fine. Not going to blame this enclosure yet, but this is the first time I've seen these drives complain. Once I have all four enterprise drives, I'll do some real testing. some reads/s sdb 1638.00 204.62 0.00 0.00 204 0 0 sdc 1637.00 204.62 0.00 0.00 204 0 0 For the curious. [468732.758363] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#3 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=19s [468732.758381] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#3 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] [468732.758389] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#3 Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code [468732.758397] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#3 CDB: Read(16) 88 00 00 00 00 00 01 e4 cf e0 00 00 01 00 00 00 [468732.758403] critical target error, dev sdb, sector 31772640 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x80700 phys_seg 32 prio class 2 I don't know enough about scsi to know what hung up here. I'll take a look at those sectors I guess. They wouldn't have remapped on a read. Yottamaster had reached out to me after my initial review on the used unit, offering a refund. Amazon had already accepted my return and sent a new one. But it's appreciated they appear proactive. So that's great! I don't mind giving this thing a shot, and hopefully it'll work out for me. If you are just wanting to mount a few drives, I'm already confident it should be fine for that. If it's not then check your cable or something. I wish I had not seen that little error :) But also I have zero experience with these usb jbod enclusures, and I was honestly just glad to see what appeared to be correct smart data :) With any luck, 4 drives should never saturate this usb-c link, so I'll see what happens. Finally, I considered getting the sabrent enclosure. However it had four soft power buttons. This one is a single switch. This enclosure makes much more sense to me for it's intended purpose. ==================================== My disks both were viewable, but all partitioning was gone. smart information was intermittently available. I was unable to see the existing data on the drives, or successfully create a partition. The drives were actually fine *save for the one that I attempted to format in this enclosure. I must have received a bad unit? Trying to decide if I should try again or go somewhere else. I liked that powers on all the disks.

I purchased this enclosure to replace a 3-year-old Sabrent DS-4SSD enclosure that's connected to a Raspberry Pi which I'm using as a NAS. The Sabrent was still working great, but the fan was getting loud and not blowing much air any more; it wasn't that quiet to begin with, actually. Though that enclosure was trayless, that might be the only advantage over this one. This one is very well built. It's lightweight but still feels very solid. The fan is silent as advertised, and the installation is trivial. I'd highly recommend this enclosure to anyone in the market. In addition, the customer service is second-to-none! Every email I've sent to them, and I've had several questions before andafter purchase, has gotten an answer within a few hours. Perhaps the only downside to this enclosure, as others who have also wanted to disable the sleep function have already noted, is the lack of clarity in doing so. For clarity, here are my instructions: 1. When you visit the Yottamaster downloads page, there are two downloads that look like they could do the job. They both might, but the one I ended up using after being instructed by Yottamaster customer service was the rar file, not the zip file: Sleep Time Setting - Firmware Update for FS4C3 FS5C3.rar. You may need 7Zip or similar to open this if your version of Windows doesn't yet have native rar support. 2. This package actually requires installation; you can't just update the firmware without installing the application. So, run the setup program inside the rar file. 3. You'll also need the firmware, the .bin file, inside the rar file. I copied it to my desktop for easy retrieval later. 4. Very important: you must have a drive in the enclosure before you update the firmware. Otherwise, Windows won't detect it, nor will the firmware application. Customer service suggested I back up the drive before doing this, too, just to be safe. Once the drive is installed, connect the enclosure to power and to your computer's USB port. Make sure you connect the cable to the "main" port and not the "hub" port on the enclosure. 5. Now, open the application that you installed, VL715MPTool. A little pop-up should come up showing that the enclosure is connected. If it doesn't, it didn't detect your enclosure. 6. In the tool bar, click on settings. 7. In the settings window, click on open file in the firmware section. Navigate to the .bin file that you extracted from the .rar archive, and click open. 8. Back in the settings window, click OK. 9. Now, click the run or auto-run button. If you don't see the run button in the toolbar, you can find it in the functions menu off of the menu bar. Or you can just use the shortcut key: ctrl+a. 10. If all went well, the pop-up window should show that one update was attempted and one update passed. You can now close the application and begin using your Yottamaster enclosure without the drives going into sleep state.

The connectivity randomly drops and the sleep function can’t be disabled after downloading the firmware update tool from their website. The performance is alright but too pricy for what it offers. Heat was well managed with one fan in the back, but the controller seems very unusable if you are going to use it with proxmox or zfs, the firmware updater didn’t work for me at all. The drive continuous to click a ton when it’s disconnected from the computer, it’s like the drives are checking for something with nothing attached to it and it doesn’t stop for 10 minutes or so.

I bought this unit to replace an aging USB 2, 4 drive, hard drive enclosure I use for a household backup for many years. I set this unit up in a test scenario for about a week to make sure everything ran smoothly. It did and it was fast. Much faster then the old USB 2 enclosure I was using. The lights on this unit are also not blindly bright, which I liked. I set this unit up with all 4 of my drives from the previous setup. Everything worked great. In fact, it was exactly the kind of upgrade I wanted. Then about 2 and a half months into it, one of my drives disappeared. I pulled the drive and tested in another machine and it worked fine, passed all tests. Put that drive back in the Yottamaster and it is not recognized. I tried a brand new drive in the same slot and the same thing happened. After swapping all the drives, several reboots, power cycles, and singing lovely show tunes to the enclosure, I could never get ANY drive to be recognized in the 3rd slot. Guess the 3rd slot died somehow. It's not under heavy use and it's practically brand new. The support site for Yottamaster is a joke. All kinds of 404 errors and no answers to any actual issues. I have emailed their support, but at this point I don't expect much. If you value your time and hate having to deal with this kind of nonsense in your home setup, I would say avoid Yottamaster at all costs. If they actually respond back to me and have a resolution, I will update this review. UPDATE 1, 3/29/24: Support got back to me and after some back and forth they agreed to ship me a new unit. I got the "new" unit today. It's a 4-port USB hub. So not exactly the same as a 4-day hard drive enclosure, but it does have the number 4 in it. I have reached back out to Yottamaster and we shall see what they come up with. Should be fun. Maybe they will ship me a new car with "4" tires next. UPDATE 2, 4/3/24: After communicating with support, the USB hub was a "gift" for the troubles. I did receive the replacement unit this week. Although I am happy with the replacement, I think this whole endeavor was more then the average user wants to go through. I am changing my review to 3 stars specifically because the customer service came through and made it right in the end.

I am very happy with this purchase. I am using the Yottamaster 5 bay RAID enclosure as secure place to store my raw videos for my Youtube channel. This is valuable media to me and I feel very secure. I purchased 5 10tb drives to use in the Yottamaster and now have 40tb of protected data (I also use an online back up company for ultimate security). I use Premier Pro to edit from the enclosure as well and find the Yottamaster to be VERY perky and responsive with fast data transfer. It also has a very attractive and professional appearance; much better looking than the stack of single USB back ups drives that used clutter up my desktop. The setup for this enclosure is SUPER EASY. It literally requires 1 min. The documentation may be minimal but just follow the given instructions EXACTLY to setup.

This is for the 10Gbps version - The build quality is good, nice weight to it, the bays are plastic though. The lights are not annoying at night, and the fan is quiet, though some of my drives make noise now, there is no vibration dampener, so when a hard drive does a starting seek or what not, it will definitely be heard. Speeds are great, I did multiple transfers simultaneously to test if it was worth it to get this more expensive version. Four drives were sending data 180-210MB/s each to SSDs, I noticed it would dip to zero if I have Windows Write Policy enabled to cache it, and choose the Better Performance option; I now left it to only have the Better Performance option (WD Easystore 14/18TB drives). It does NOT read 4Kn drives, I had shucked an old 3TB Seagate Desktop Plus drive, and it read 2TB as offline space and 750GB as unallocated, I would have risk using DDM or format the entire thing so put it back as external USB. The fan automatically goes up, doesn't get loud. Temps it's maintaining on my drives are 40c, when a drive is in use, it's 42c; could probably go lower if I placed the enclosure in a more ventilated area - temps before drives were shucked were 51c/55c. Got this because it turns back on after a power outage and the speeds advertised. Final notes: Bought used-Like New, was missing the manual but that can be obtained online, also missing some screws. The instructions listed here to update the sleep firmware are outdated and confusing. On their site just get the one for the 4/5 bay enclosure, however it did not work. Their support takes a long time to respond - I'm STILL waiting for their updated guide, been over a week now. But with that said, my enclosure does NOT go to sleep, wondering if previous person already updated or since I have sleep disabled on Windows 10, if that's affecting it. Either way, no complaints. Also, don't be like me and blindly plug in the USB-C cable without looking at the back, I thought the unit was broken because I kept re-plugging into the port labeled "hub".

Works great fully loaded with drives. Hits about 250 read and write speed which is fantastic for 7200 drives. The only issue I have had is I run a USB C passive hub daisy-chained through it. I have my webcam, mouse and keyboard plugged in. I need the drive on for this passive hub to work which is no issue. However.....when I plug in my M.2 USB 3 drive to my passive hub (which is chained through the Yottamaster..) all the drives disconnect as I suppose this is the straw which breaks the camels back. Just enough passive power to make all the drives shut down disconnecting. I can simply turn the Yottamaster off then back on again and everything then works but for hotswapping a drive this is not a good solution as apps open using these Yottamaster drives are having a bad time. So yeah chaining hotswappable drives isn't a good idea in my scenario and maybe not for yours. That said, I now use another hub that isn't chained through the drive and everything works great now. Cheers!