SABRENT10 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Docking Station, USB 3.2 Type-C/Type-A, 10Gbps, Trayless, Independent Power, Cooling Fans, Tool-Free, Compatible with Windows/Mac/Linux (DS-UCTB)

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.

The Sabrent 10-bay USB enclosure is the single best addition to my PC system in years. It's about the size of a medium-sized desktop tower pc. It is solidly built of metal, and is quite heavy. Drives simply slide in to the ten bays, each of which has its own door and it's own power switch. The controller in the enclosure handles handles access and governs traffic, requiring only a single USB-C connection to your laptop or desktop. The internal power supply is fed by a single standard three-prong grounded AC cable.I've found this to be a solid, reliable, and very fast platform for my various SATA drives, and a huge improvement over the tangled bedlam of external single drives, RAID enclosures, power supplies, extension cables, data cables, hubs, power supplies for hubs etc., etc., that had become a plague to my computer system. I see in some reviews that folks have expressed trouble with the drives disconnecting. My experience had been the exact opposite. I think the disconnection troubles I had in the past were due to running through one or more powered USB hubs just to accommodate all the external drives; I think various firmware-based power timeouts were involved. In this case, I've got the entire stack of ten connected to the OC by a single USB cable, going directly into the computer: no hubs. The drives go to sleep, certainly, but awake immediately upon demand. I've had zero trouble with disconnections. This is a big part of why I've characterized this unit as "solid, stable, and fast."This could not be more welcome.A long time pc user, I kind of moved sideways from desktops to laptops as a primary platform, gaining flexibility, portability, and convenience - in many ways. But.In other ways, the laptop form factor imposes strict limitations, most especially, in storage expansion.As a multi-decade serious photographer and at-home video and music producer, the move from analog to digital has introduced serious, grown-up, storage, archive and preservation issues, not to mention capacity issues.So what began for me as a couple of USB external expansion drives grew over time into a glutted city of USB drives and USB RAID enclosures, accompanied by an increasingly unmanageable tangle of cables, power supplies, and hubs. I was plagued with disconnects, time-outs, and other issues, intermittent, yet never ending.This enclosures has alleviated all of that. The drives simply work, and work well.I broke up the RAID-1 enclosures, and over a period of several weeks, sequentially copied all the material on them onto individual drives installed in this enclosure: a kind of extended bucket brigade process. The drives originated mostly as bare drives I already had in use as RAID pairs. As a pair of RAID drives would become empty and available, I split them up, reformatted them, and moved them into the 10-bay enclosure.What about RAID? Well, Windows does a decent job of handling RAID in software. If you think about it, all RAID is actually in software, just some of that software is installed as firmware in hardware. So far, I haven't rebuilt any of the four RAID-1 groups I had before, opting, for now, to manage mirroring and backup manually across the drives in the enclosure. If and when that becomes too unwieldy, I'll move back to RAID-1 pairs, but software-based, on drives in the enclosure.To sum up moving my drives into this enclosure has been a rigorous but welcome project. It has resulted in fewer duplicate management issues, hugely increased efficiency, and much improved reliability.I am delighted with the Sabrent 10-bay enclosure.

I bought this when Amazon had it on sale for 399. I should have not pulled the trigger on it. Overall the product idea and design is not a bad thing. one cord to connect 10 drives, way better than trying to find a case or having an open case with all those cables every where. The major issue I had with this unit is there is no air flow for the drives. All the reviews that I have seen never mentions how hot the drives get. It does have two fans in the back, but the issue there is you have the PCB (Where the drives connect to), blocking the fans, so the air flows from the front to back, but the air is being pulled along the sides and not over the drives. I though maybe I could use a fan or fans in the front and blow the air in, but found that wouldn't work either. Even though it has a semi mesh on each of the doors, those holes are block by a spring like metal band on the back side of the door that pushes the drives firmly into the bay.When the drive bays are all on and full, the drives at idle sit betwen 37C to 40C and when they start doing work, temps start heading toward 45C+. I now have three drives with bad sectors because of the over heating. I also noticed that the fans in the back we not turning for some reason, but I only caught it doing that one time.Also if you are using unraid, I can tell you for reason, all the drive bays were constanly being accessed eventhough the files I was coping was only to one drive in the raid.Other than the heat issue, this isn't a bad product. Easy to load the drives, easy hook up, and overall setup. Its just the heating issue that ruins this product, at least for me.