Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure – USB 3.0 & eSATA Support 16TB – (Renewed)

After desktop computers are upgraded, old hard drives with lower capacity are moved out the computer case and replaced with higher capacity ones. What can we do with those old hard drives? They can be put into single external USB drive enclosures but doing so can be tedious and messy if there are more than 2 hard drives.The Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure solved this problem by holding 4 hard drives in a single enclosure that is not much larger than 4 separate drive enclosures with active cooling stacked. It is essentially a 4-drive enclosure with a 4-port SATA/USB hub in one nice looking box.The first refurbished unit worked perfectly right out of the box. I liked it so much so I ordered a second one. Well the second one did not work. It powered down after less a minute being turned on. Amazon sent me the replacement unit. It worked perfectly like the first one. As it turned out, the power adapter from the second unit was defective as using it on the third unit also caused it to power off after less a minute.Eight old SATA hard drives went into two Mediasonic enclosures (3TB x2, 2TB x 4, and 1.5TB x 2), 10TB and 7TB, for a total storage of 17TB!When combined with a BMAX MiniPC ($179.99), this combo became a great low cost NAS. The MiniPC is equipped with a 4 core processor, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD, running Windows 10 Pro. It has 3 USB 3.0 ports, one of them being the USB-C type, two USB 2.0 ports, 2 HDMI ports, as well as a Gigabit ethernet port. The MiniPC can also be used an HTPC.Since Windows 10 Pro has built-in support for Storage Spaces, a newer version of Windows software based RAID, each 4 hard drives in a single enclosure are configured as one storage pool with a single drive letter. Eight hard drives become two logical drives, D and E. In theory, all 8 drives can be put into a single storage pool but if one box goes bad, the whole pool is dead.The total cost is $360 for this equivalent 8 bay NAS ($180 for the MiniPC and $180 for two enclosures). The performance is really good considering the age of those SATA drives. I cannot think there is a better priced NAS unit that can compete with this!

I have had this unit for several months and it has worked wonderfully. I bought it to get some use out of the older SATAs drive I had hanging around. Soon after i got this enclosure, my wife gave me my first Mac, and I found out that it's easy in MacOS to build a larger drive out of concatenating smaller individual disks. I do landscape photography, and I now use this "drive" as my main workhorse. Out of the 4 available slots, I used one of my older 1GB SATA drive as a "Time Machine" (Mac-speak for a backup drive). The other 3 slots are used as concatenated drives to make a larger 8GB (4+2+2) drive to hold all my pics. It took minutes to set up, and since then I've had no issues, no problems, no failures. The drives are under a lot of stress, several of my photo apps continually index the files, and when I work on post-processing or viewing, large sections of the drives are accessed for long periods of time. I very barely hear the fan at all, it's considerably less loud than the TV in the other side of the house from me at normal volume, which I can hear just fine while next to the enclosure. The lights are bright but I like seeing them, they give me a good clear idea of which drive is being accessed and for how long. Honestly this enclosure is considerably more efficient and useful than anything I had expected given the price. I am now looking to buy another one to hold the rest of my older SATAs.

nice small box to throw in any misc hard drives in you got laying around. easy to install hard drives, and seems to stay cool so far. i rated it 4 stars because of the front cover. doesnt work well if you have it sitting on the floor. if you barely bump the front of the case it opens up the front door , then when you try to close it it doesnt line up right and have too lift the front of the box to get the door back in. just a goofy design. i choose not to put it on my desk because the fan is a little bit loud, but most fans are. i saw alot of reviews complaining about all the lights on the front. it has a silid light bar the whidth of the box, which is kinds cool. looks like something out of the knight rider show. 1 light for each hard drive so you know which hard drive is being accessed. as far as all the other lights, they could be covered with tape if they are too bright. overall this is a good product for its price at $90.

This is a great product for the price. I am amazed at some of the negative comments. The one major negative comment I agree with is the poor user's manual but I easily figured how to work it. But other than that it serves by needs perfectly. The fan has several speed settings. If you want it quiet set it on a lower speed. There are several fan settings. I set the fan on automatic and the fan noise is minimal. I have 4 hard drives installed and use it to backup my NAS through the USB interface. I originally set it up using the ESATA interface but it showed all 4 drive as a single large drive which is not what I wanted. I use the USB 3.0 interface. USB transfers are fast and reliable. I transfer up to 6 TB of data a week with no problems. The drives are easily immediately recognized by Windows. Once I figured out how to set it up it works perfectly. I have not had to touch it. Its runs constantly 24 - 7 for four months now.

Seems to work well as a JBOD. I have mine set up with software raid as a Time Machine drive for network backups. I am using it attached to an iMac with USB2.The reason I gave it a 3 is:1. the fan is VERY noisy so it's not suitable for an office application and should be used in a "network room", it also seems to just stay on the same speed (high) all the time whether drives are active or not.2. Not really sure about drive capacity. The instructions that come with it say it takes up to 3 TB drives, the manufacturers web site says up to 5 Tb drives and this ad says up to 10TB drives. I have a 2.5TB drive and a 500GB drive in mine right now but who knows what it will actually take.For some reason I thought it had hardware RAID but it does not although that does not figure into my rating as it doesnt say it does on the Amazon site.