IO CREST Hard Drive Enclosure Supports Multi Bay via USB Interface, Black, 8-Bay

I have had several external drives hooked to my iMac for various purposes, and for this reason, I've always been short of USB ports and really tired of all the power bricks for each drive. I had power strips and USB hubs and cables everywhere. This box is the perfect solution for that problem. I have mounted 5 bare drives in the 8 slots of my unit, getting rid of 4 USB port cables, an extra USB hub (that often gave me issues) and 5 separate power bricks. This thing cleaned up my computer setup immensely. The box is quiet (actually silent sitting on the floor next to my computer desk), compact, and in the month since I bought it, it's worked perfectly. No unwanted disconnects, and hey, it just works! It has a master power switch on the lower left corner of the front, to shut off power to the entire unit. And each drive slot has a switch to power down just that drive. This is very handy, since the drives are hot-swappable, and this allows you to power down only the drive you want to change out, and power up a replacement when you're ready. Within a minute or so of powering it up, the new drive appears in the computer's drive list. This also allows you to have drives "off-line", but ready to go at the touch of a button. All without dismounting the other drives in the unit. This enclosure is NOT a RAID device. Each drive shows up as a separate disk as if it were separately connected to the computer. You could create a RAID array with RAID software if you want, but the enclosure has no such capability built in. It's a JBOD, "Just a Bunch Of Drives," which is exactly what I needed. It's not a NAS, either. It's connected directly to the computer through USB (or a eSATA connection of you want), not to the network router. Its volumes can, however, be shared just like any other external drives within the capabilities of whatever OS you're using. It works like a charm on my iMac, running Mojave, and the mounted drives show up fine in Windows 10 running under Parallels. (If you do as I did and use external drives removed from Seagate's proprietary cases, you'll probably have to reformat them once, because the Seagate interface does something funky to how they communicate. This box has a standard SATA interface for each slot, so any bare SATA drives will slip right in and work like a charm.) It works just like a generic external enclosure for each drive. Yes, the box has a plastic bezel in front, but the rest of the case is made of sturdy steel. (It looks and is made much like a black medium-sized tower PC case. ) The drive trays are made of fairly light plastic with a small metal insert at the front where the latching mechanism lives. But the latches are easy to operate (squeeze from the sides), and the trays are easy to insert and remove. If you're just a bit careful with the trays when they're removed, they will work fine. It would be nice if Syba sold the mounting trays separately, but to my knowledge they do not. The drive mounting trays do fit into the box well, the latches work, and there's plenty of ventilation for the drives, with the high/low speed selection on the internal fan. The trays will work with standard 3.5" drives or 2.5" laptop-sized ones, and they are "toolless", since you don't need screws to mount standard drives. There are springy plastic fingers on the side of the tray that snap into the mounting hole locations on 3.5" drives. The trays have holes in the bottom (and they give you little bags of the proper screws to mount 2.5" laptop drives.) I did have one issue when I mounted a laptop drive. The back right side spring pin hit the side of the drive since there's no hole there, so when you try to install the tray, the spring pin sticks out and makes it quite difficult to slide in. I think that particular spring pin would probably end up broken off if you did that very often. But if I was going to use those drives often, I'd probably just snap that back pin off in those trays anyway, because even with only 3 of the 4 pins in place, the drive would be more than adequately secured. So, small problem, easy solution. My only small gripe was that there was no natural place to put labels on the front of the drive trays to indicate what drive is where. You get up to 8 drive slots, depending on the configuration you buy, and after a while, it can get clumsy to keep referring to an external key as to what drive is in what slot. I solved that by designing and 3D printing a small 1-1/2" wide by 1" high T-shaped name plate that slides into the cooling vent between the latches (there's plenty of other space for sufficient airflow). I put a printed DYMO label on each that's easy to change if I need to. Now it's easy to tell what's where. I did order a longer USB 3.0 cable, because the 1m/3ft. cable that came with it wouldn't easily reach to the back of the computer. When I test the speed on the drives, they are exactly the same speed as when they were individually connected before. (I didn't test the eSATA interface.) All in all, this is exactly what I needed. I'm very happy with this Syba drive enclosure. Update: 10/2022 I'm now using a PC vs. my old iMac, but this box is still exactly what I need. It works just as well with the PC as it did with the iMac. Of course, I had to reformat the drives, but that's because of the change of operating systems, not a fault of the device. The speed is based on the interface you connect it to. I'm. My case, it's USB 3.1, and the transfer speed to WD spinning drives is about 100-12MB/s.

I have had mine for over 6 months and it has worked flawlessly. The drives were very easy to install as well as connecting the USB 3.0 to a port on my PC. I like that I can individually turn the drives on and off as well as turn the complete rack on and off. I used a label maker to identify each drive which helps remembering which drive is plugged into what tray position. The unit runs cool and quiet, the sound from the fan is very low. The design fits nicely on my desk, looks nice and clean, and does not take up much space. I would definitely recommend this product. It is a very good value for the money as you can't beat the price.

The 8 drive bay worked beautifully with 6 of my drives attached, a 10 TB, 8 TB, 2x 6 TB, and 2x 4 TB. Thermals were good, fans were whisper silent, speeds were slow but acceptable (despite USB 3.0 on paper supporting 600 MB/s transfer speeds, this gets around 150 MB/s shared across ALL drives). Why the one star? It gets I/O errors randomly. There is no real rhyme or reason to it, but every so often a drive would disconnect entirely and disappear from Explorer OR it would appear, show my folders, but any attempt to open them was met with an I/O Disk Read Error. These drives had no issues before being placed in the enclosure and after being put BACK into my machine (originally got this since I wanted to swap my case but finding a mid-tower with 6+ 3.5'' bays like my Phantom 410 is not an easy task anymore) leads me to believe that the enclosure is at fault. There also is a nasty little design flaw that Syba informed me WAS expected behaviour: The drives will enter sleep after a certain amount of inactivity regardless of any settings in Windows be it USB sleep settings or hard disk sleep settings. This is an issue if you're using these for a media server like I was. There's a noticeable delay when the drives spin back on and almost all of the times I got that dreaded I/O error was when a drive was waking. If given that I/O error the only way to fix it was to physically turn either the drive on and off or the whole enclosure. Not an ideal solution, and I couldn't safely eject any time I did this as Windows would tell me the drive was in use. If you value your data, I would steer clear using this as a daily driver. Maybe as an on-site backup, but if you want to actually USE the drives installed regularly, look elsewhere.

This thing is everything I wanted at a price point that still shocks me. It is FANTASTIC. There is one technical snag I hit - read 3rd paragraph. I got this because I outgrew my QNAP TR-004 (4 bay DAS). All I really want is a USB JBOD enclosure for my backup pool of disks that I mostly leave disconnected. Right away I was very impressed with the build quality and noise level. I was also extremely happy to see that there is no special controller in front of the disks, so you can use smartmontools to read S.M.A.R.T. data for each of the disks. I thought my QNAP DAS was ok, but this is way better, since the QNAP had some controller that prevented me from accessing S.M.A.R.T. data (probably so it can do hardware RAID, which I don't care about). So basically, I am over the moon with this thing. There was one technical snag I had to work out, and honestly it was almost a deal-breaker. On Linux I would repeatedly hit issues that would cause I/O to hang on the attached disks, but there is an easy solution - use the usb-storage driver instead of UAS. Basically, in dmesg I would see messages like "tag#25 uas_eh_abort_handler 0 uas-tag 1 inflight: CMD OUT." Just look up how to use the legacy usb-storage driver over UAS and it should resolve this. The only other thing I have to complain about is that there is no manual and I don't think I figured out the way I'm supposed to get disks in each bay. It was easy still, but I feel like I'm missing something about how I'm supposed to do it. Related, the box included a bunch of screws, but I have no idea why. Other tiny notes that someone may care about: - Mine arrived with the branding "iocrest" instead of "Syba" though it is clearly the same device - When connecting, the hardware recognized is an internal ASM107x USB hub, and then disks are seen as direct SCSI attached via "InX8 Inc [AKiTiO] Mass Storage"

This DAS enclosure is pretty good, and I need a DAS enclosure after when my Full Tower Case ran out of Hard Drive Locations (The product was decent value for 8-Bay Storage). However, this produce has some cons. For example, the enclosure does not power down or sleep when PC is sleep or hard drives are not in use. This causes problems for the Hard Drives in the enclosures, because they are always powered on and running (Powered On Hours are always going up). Therefore, you would have to manually power it off. Second con is that if you are downloading multiple files and transferring files within das or from desktop, the system would malfunction would require system reboot (Hard Drives would disconnect from the windows). I wouldn't run games off of this das storage, but as a media storage is perfectly fine. If you can find better DAS storage with sleep function, then buy them instead of this product.

Product: 8 Bay I had a bunch of old SSD drives hanging off cables on my engineering rig that were just taking up space. I had several single and dual SATA > USB interfaces for hot swapping drives, but they were not made for long term usage of multiple drives. Saw this rack and took the risk at just under 2 bills, and so far I could not be more happy with it. You do need to remove one of the dimpled bracket inserts from each rack in order to use 2.5" SSD drives, as the rack will not insert with that thing being pushed outward from the drive pressing on the dimple. But removal is super simple by pushing in on the clip on the insert. If you're using one of these you should be able to figure that out though. The power cable is standard, with no odd shaped plugs that waste space on an UPS rack. The rack has a main power button and each tray has its own power button. Each tray has a power and activity LED, as does each power button. The LEDs are bright enough to be seen but subtle enough not to take over. No disco light shows distracting you. Three fans, two for the rack and a smaller one next to the power input. They are quiet but keep SSDs cool. Not sure how they hold up under the heat of spinners. I did not expect this to work much more than a cleaner way to repurpose some old drive space, its usually not recommended to use USB drive interfaces to install and run applications or games directly to. But I don't let other people tell me what to do and surprisingly it works alright. It's definitely a lot cleaner, safer and more functional than hanging drives from their cables behind a desk.

I bought this thing in 2020 and it is still going strong. I just wanted to add drives to my file box. I didn't want to pay for hardware RAID that I wasn't going to use (I use ZFS or software RAID so I'm not depending on some piece of hardware if I need to recover), and this tower fit the bill. Caveats: Depending on your OS/Kernel, it might not support SMART. On my old server, it didn't. Now running Xubuntu 24.04 LTS and it does. Also support SMART under Windows. Other thing to consider: because this is a no-name manufacturer, buying at a different time might mean different internal hardware. There's no way to be sure. However, as long as it presents the disks to the OS, all should be fine if you're running software and organizing your disks by unique IDs and not by OS-given names (like sda). Finally, this is not hot-swappable in the way I understand "hot swappable" under normal use cases. I mean, you can remove or power down a disk while the tower is running, but dog help you if you haven't unmounted it first and the system is trying to write to it.

Starts out great, but as others reported, over 2 years old, and it starts to decline FAST. All day, every day now these drives drop and return 100 times a day. These are 2-year devices, that is all you will get out of it before it declines into not being useful at all, and it becomes a crutch on your system. The speed was great, but declined, the noise was never an issue. The design is great, but if you need it to work for the long term, they did not address that aspect. It is compact, and fits great on my desk space for it, but that does not matter if it dies after a few years. Drives are easy to mount, but not if it dies in 2 years as well.

Este articulo parecia una excelente solucion para tener 8 discos duros en un espacio pequeño, ventilados y por USB... Pero no lo fue. Los discos se desmontan aleatoriamente. Se tiene que reiniciar cada 2 o 3 horas para que aparezcan todos los discos. Intente instalar el ultimo firmware directamente de Syba, no funciono. Cambiar de discos y tampoco. Cambiar los lugares de los discos y tampoco. Usar otra computadora y tampoco. Usar otro sistema operativo... Y es lo mismo. Tanto en Windows, MacOs y Linux es lo mismo. Acabe perdiendo muchisimo tiempo. Ahorratelo tu tambien

Got my item, as I tried to install the hard drives, the shelves were drilled wrong and you are unable to screw in the hard drives for secure holding, and also came with an non-UK power cord, forcing me to go out and buy an adapter to allow me to use the item, once the enclosure was plugged in, to electricity and pc, the enclosure was dead, not turning on at all.

Pensé que me estaba arriesgando al comprar este producto después de leer algunas reseñas. Estoy usando este enclosure con MacOS X sin ningún problema, todos los discos son detectados correctamente y estoy usando las 8 bandejas con una mezcla de discos de diferentes marcas, capacidades y tamaños. Le estoy quitando una estrella solo por el hecho de que los discos duros de 2.5" hacen que las bandejas no entren y salgan como lo hacen con los discos de 3.5", esto es por un error en el diseño que esta hecho especialmente para los discos de 3.5". Con los discos de 2.5" los clips plásticos que tienen las bandejas quedan un poco extruidos por el lado donde va el disco y esto hace que tengas que meter y sacar la bandeja a presión como forzando la entrada y salida. Fuera de eso todo ha funcionado muy bien y confirmo que los abanicos del enclosure son bastante silenciosos.

I bought this as a media server, and perhaps that was my error. I'd read the reviews and it seemed it would suit, however it would frequently drop all the drives during light use and crash explorer and other applications if more than one drive was accessed at the same time. Might be fine as a storage device for infrequently accessed data. Set up was easy and it ran quiet so there's that.

Si están encendidas varias bahias a la vez, suelo tener desconexiones de USB con la computadora, aún si solo un disco está en uso transfiriendo datos. Tengo que apagar la mayoría y dejar encendidas solo 1 o 2 al mismo tiempo para no tener este problema.