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

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.

I had a bunch of legacy drives and was swapping out my computer, I didn't want my new huge tower to be stuffed with hard drives for various reasons. This connected with USB quickly and all my drives showed up in Linux. It even works with LUKS (encryption) without problem. Just a note: This isn't RAID nor did I want it, but in certain cases transferring files will be slow. Especially between drives in the same tower -- the nature of USB is that the processor has to handle it and send it down the same wire. Imagine a 1 car tunnel on a two way street. One side passes, then has to yield to the other side. Yeah, it's gonna be slower than a seamless flow of 2 way traffic. It'll eventually get it done but is not something for speed demons. For a faster exchange of data from drives into the tower to another, I would suggest keeping the drive you are transferring data to from the others via a seperate cable - whether internal to your computer tower or a seperate single enclosure - I had various external drives that I just took apart and put the new HDD in without much problem. As it is, it's perfect for those drives you put the random files on or archive. I'm reading about those who are putting SDDs in these and expecting speed -- USB is not appropriate for speed in the first place. That's what SATA/eSATA is for at the least, although NVMe is fastest. Second, you're not gonna split 4/8 drives and get cutting edge speed. Does not happen. Great for archival, transfer of files if you have time, and storing HDDs out of the way but still usable. Bad for getting the most speed out of your drives, especially if accessing 2+ at a time.

I had all these extra SATA drives lying around after having done some upgrades over the years. This is a great place for me to store and still use the drives. I've read this doesn't do RAID, but I haven't tried attempting it. It's easy to use. Plug in the power, plug the USB cord into the PC, and put a drive in. You pull out the tray and just pop a drive in, no screws needed. You will need to pull the clip back so the hard drive will fit in properly. The clip is on the side where a rail would be, and holds the drive in place. Then just push it into the box. You can individually turn on each drive. I have all 8 filled, from 500 GB up to 8 GB drives. Haven't had a problem using any of them. For a new drive, you may need to use the hard disk manager to tell Windows there is a drive, and then format it. I've left all of them on, and able to access each one. But in normal use, I just turn on the ones I need. Now there is a master power. It can turn off the power to all the drives at once. When you power on, it will turn on all the drives. It does not remember which drives was on before. So I usually just leave the master button on, and individually turn on or off the ones I need. It works best plugging it into USB 3.

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 enclosure is fantastic and great for Plex users. In the past I've bought a couple of inexpensive 5 bay HDD enclosures for my Plex server and was always disappointed with the build quality and ability to cool the drives. This 8 bay Syba enclosure really exceeded my expectations for the price. It's well made and thought out, easy to set up, silent, keeps my drives cool, has mechanical power switches so the drives turn back on after a power outage, and though rated for 16TB, I have 20 TB drives installed and the entire drive is recognized. My only issue is once the drives are inserted it's very difficult to pull some of them out. Being USB 3.0, copies are not as fast as I'd like but that's the problem with USB and big files, not the enclosures fault. Highly recommend!

i bought this to replace 1 that was starting to drop harddrives. its not very big which i was surprised about because the 1 it is replacing is bigger even though they both hold the same amount of drives. each drive has its own power button which is great for switching out drives if you need to and the case has a power button if you want to switch everything off. the harddrives are easy to install, although the tray that the harddrive sits in is plastic so you need to take your time putting a drive into a tray. no screws required. the case itself is sturdy and made of metal and the two fans om the back so far seem to be really quiet.. each bay has its own power light and activity lightso you can see which drive is being accessed. i live in the UK and the plug is NOT UK compatible, but if you have an old kettle plug say from an old PC that works fine as that is what i had to use. all in all a nice bit of kit and i would recommend this to anyone.

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.

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

It has issues when more than one drive is accessed as the same time, and has to be reset. Hard to figure out how to update as the instructions are hard to follow, perhaps that will resolve the issues.