TERRAMASTER D5-300 USB3.1 (Gen1) Type C 5-Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure - RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, Clone, JBOD, Single Disk Hard Disk RAID Storage (Diskless)

Having used several brands and configurations of RAID enclosure over the years, TerraMaster stand out for the ease of assembly and reliability once in service. This enclosure is RAID 5 only and needs no switches (other than for power) to aid set-up; there is a similar enclosure that offers RAID 0 or 1 on the first two bays with the other three as individual drives, e. F, G & H and which can thus be of whatever capacity suits a specific need. The enclosure will support 14 TB drive units (possibly also 16 TB).Assembly is not tool-free and requires use of a supplied screwdriver and sets of screws, one for 3.5-inch units and another for 2.5-inc HDDs and SSDs. With unpacked drives, assembly needs no more than 10-15 minutes, a few more if they need to be unpacked.In this instance, an existing RAID set-up was transferred from a problematic enclosure (a now discontinued brand and one of the oldest owned) to this and it was immediately recognised and accepted. That was not the experience with smaller TerraMaster enclosures where the RAID set-up had to be redone from scratch (after backing-up, of course).There are few current options for 5-bay enclosures and this is the last known. While reliable and easy to assemble, it is unfortunately not inexpensive but the quality and reliability make it worth its price.POSTSCRIPT @ 11/2020TerraMaster's RAID Manager software was once available, then not found on their website for a year or more, but is now available once again. It is intended to provide alternative RAID configurations which may be available only if a lesser number of drive units (at least 2) are installed or when others of their enclosures are used; some enclosures can be configured via hardware. but not the D5-300. It has other functions, too, and can be compared with the older JMRaid Manager and the more recent and nearly identical Orico version although with a more basic (non-graphic) user interface.

As stated in the title it does the job. The only downside to this unit is the transfer speed. I have set 4x2Tb drives in raid 0 (which was very easy to do) and it works the way it should but even though it is a usb3 link, the read and write speeds are not very good. I haven't done any tests to see what the bottleneck is but these same drives in raid 0 are capable for much faster speeds. I will still recommend it for anyone that needs the capacity and doesn't want to open their machine the. Again, it does the job and other than the speed, it is perfect for my needs.

I suspect I just got unlucky as most of the reviews here seem to be complimentary about this device. I've had a Qnap previously but not a straight drive holding storage case like this. I was recommended this by a friend who uses one and, in all honesty, it's probably more than I really needed, as I don't care about raid systems or anything like that. I just wanted the facility to stick in a new SSD for playing games on my Mac that need a lot of loading speed, like Warcraft, and also strip out two of the internal drives from big plastic boxes that were cluttering up my computer desk.I also took the opportunity to remove the two drives from my - now defunct - Qnap and put them in here as well so I could run a Plex server again.The problems started when I noticed that the device seemed to be constantly kicking up and then powering down, with various disks being accessed all the time, even when the computer was in sleep mode. The first drive to fail was one from my original Qnap, and it suddenly unmounted itself and gave disk error 8 when trying to remount it, and disk utility couldn't fix it. Annoyingly, this was the disc that I'd nominated as my back up and just moved a load of old pictures and documents onto for safety, and re-used the space on the other disks.I hadn't even had time to get the back up system copying these onto my one drive yet so I lost some data from that issue.Second drive to fail was the drive I was using to store tv shows and the like for the Plex server. A few years worth of collected stuff gone as well there. I foolishly also put this down to it being an old disk and was badly advised that the system was probably operating ok and I was just a bit unlucky to lose another drive.By this time the fan was intermittently making a horrible noise when it spun up (which seemed far too often) causing excessive case vibration. I put a lot of the noise down to the cheap feel of the plastic drive enclosures. Considering the price of. the unit, I did expect the build quality to be a bit more polished.The powering down and up constantly of the unit and the fact that it was always noisy by this time led me to decide I wasn't risking any more drives and contacted Amazon to arrange a refund. They won't just replace the unit for me as it's supplied by an external provider and I balked at seeing how much information I'd need to be supplying terra master direct, including supplying them with the failed drives for them to inspect (!!!!) before they'd replace it direct.Inevitable, just before I powered it down, to repackage for return, I found it had unmounted another drive - this time the brand new SSD, so I knew it couldn't be an issue with the drives themselves. That's just too much of a coincidence.I did buy another terra master after sending this one back, as it's probably just me being very unlucky, but I went for a model without any raid or stuff I don't need. This one is an older model but does seem to be working ok.That's about as fair as I can be in this review, bearing in mind I was gnashing about all my data loss.