StarTech.com 3.5" External Dual Hard Drive Enclosure – Raid – USB-C and USB-A – SATA 6Gbps – 2 Bay USB 3.1 SSD/HDD Enclosure (S352BU313R)

Very happy with this excellent exclosure. I am a big fan of StarTech, i'll make no apologies for that. I have a lot of their products and whilst they are maybe not as aesthetically pleasing to look at as other products, they are always reliable, fairly priced and work great. I love this enclosure, it's VERY fast, as long as your hardware has USB 3.0 or 3.1. Sure the fan is noticeable when on but it's not going to require that you but ear defenders or anything like that. I like the fact that the fan turns off when the PC goes to sleep mode. And when you eject the device it also turns off and the fan shuts off, nice touch.You do have to read the manual though if you want to change the RAID dip switches, it's not just a simple matter of changing the switches then turning on again, you have to push an internal button then turn off, trust me it's not hard just read the manual!So in summary, great product, fast, easy to use and reliable. Very happy.

This is a splendid bit of kit.Bought it because my fully-loaded MacPro died and I figured an iMac with one of these attached would be a decent replacement.Nice design. You get a get 4 sets of pop-on rails for the SATA drives included. Not 100% obvious which way up they go from the instructions supplied but you can figure it out with a little trial and error as the rails come off easily enough with a blunt knife (it's spring-clip upwards, if you're interested).Transferring the data from my old Mac HD mounted in this rack gave me a sustained 52mb/sec.5 super-bright blue LEDs give you power & drive status for each bay.Things I'd change to make it perfect:Fascia being attached with Allen keys rather than just a clip makes changing the drives around a .bit of a faff. Then again I guess it cuts down on vibration noise so I guess it's only an issue if you plan to swap the drives a lot.Price is a shade high for what it is. They could probably shave a few quid off by not giving you mains plugs for every country in the world…Other than that - if you need a lot of storage or you're a cautious type who'd like a 4-disk RAID I think you're pretty much sorted here.UPDATE:I already had one of these, and while it wasn't cheap it has worked perfectly for years.I was starting to acquire rather too many standalone USB backup drives and decided to bust them out and mount them in a single enclosure to keep things tidy.They daisy-chain together over Thunderbolt, they're not silent but they're not too noisy, and they're completely reliable. You can even hot-swap SATA drives if you need to although getting the front plate off is a touch fiddly.The company provide outstanding aftercare as well. so even though you're paying quite a bit for an empty box you do get your money's worth. Recommended.

Offers RAID 1 which is ideal, put in a couple of large pro disks and it's very fast and easily keeps up with multiple 4k60 streaming, Roon Labs library for several users, Plex etc. Backups are stored at high speed, probably as fast as the disks will go. Very good direct attached storage.Being direct attached using USB 3.1 means it's between 5x and 10x faster than a 1 gig Ethernet NAS and will also be included on all backups from Backblaze and other similar backup services unlike network attached NAS devices which Backblaze won't include in a backup.There are a lot of less than desirable storage devices out there and some cost 10x this little thing but this delivers great performance and RAID 1 resilience for not a lot of money. Very good little box and very easy to use and setup.

Set this up (instructions didn't match the hardware - LED indicators were different and behaviour wasn't as expected) after some trial and error and performance seemed fine. The drive operated and woke/slept as expected for a few days using a dedicated PCI USB 3.1 host adapter and 2 identical SATA 3.5" NAS (WD red) drives as RAID1 (mirror).However, after a few more days (total about 7), the array would not mount. Fortunately I was able to recover the data using other means, but with brand new drives and a brand new NAS enclosure, my confidence was shaken and this waste of plastic and time was returned. If your data is important, I would recommend purchasing a more expensive device for storage purposes.I am a happy owner of various other startech.com equipment and it has always performed well and been of good quality, this however is a significant disappointment.

I have a mid-2010 Mac Pro, which doesn't support USB 3 or thunderbolt, so my only option for fast external HDD was e-SATA. I was attracted to the StarTech as it was cheap, well designed, and StarTech have a good reputation. Plus it has USB 3, which is good if I eventually upgrade to a machine that supports it.So far so good. I have it hooked to a Sonnet Tempo E2P PCIe card, and RAID mode is 0 (striped). I don't need the drives to be fault tolerant, just fast. There are 2 WD green 1TB drives inside.I'm getting write speeds of 110 MB/sec which I'm very happy about. If the device proves to be reliable, I'll be getting a second one, and using them both as off-site backups.Some advice if you get this drive :(1) Don't mix drive sizes in combined mode, because when one is full, it may hang. In fact only mix drive sizes in JBOD mode.(2) When you switch RAID modes, you may need to format the drives individually before the new mode is picked up correctly. So select JBOD, format each drive, then switch to the mode you actually want. This worked for me when changing from combined to striped.At the end of the day, this is a cheap case, so expect some quirks. But if you are methodical when setting up, you will get good results.