Hard Drive Enclosure, CENMATE Aluminum 2 Bay RAID Enclosure with Fan for 2.5/3.5 SATA HDD/SSD with USB A/C 3.0, Tool Free, 4 Mode(Support RAID 1/0/JBOD/NORMAL)

The performance is absolutely brilliant on this twin RAID device. Very easy to set-up. Price is the best I found.My only quirk WAS that it didn’t seem to have any power management so the hard drives were constantly spinning. I think this is imperative with this sort of device as they tend to be left on constantly so I might have ended up buying one with this feature and selling this one on when I have the spare funds.However, after leaving a review stating this; the seller got in touch with me and offered a refund, and when I accepted they asked me to first try reflashing the firmware with a different EEPROM image that includes 'hibernate'. It now shuts down after 30 seconds of inactivity. PERFECT! Exactly what I wanted. Flashing program was unsigned Windows .exe file; I'm not sure if there's a Linux one available; with my drives being used for a Raspberry Pi NAS but in my case I was able to take the drive away to my Windows PC to do it.If you're looking for a USB twin SATA enclosure with or without hardware RAID function, BUY THIS ONE! It's absolutely brilliant and the seller is very helpful. Thankyou!!!Fan is very noisy as other reviews mention but its just a case of four Philips screws to take the back panel off and swap out the 50x50x10mm 12vDC "jet engine" that comes with the enclosure for a quiet fan that can be bought for about £5.99 off Amazon. Not a problem if your drives are kept somewhere the noise isn't a problem.Looks very nice. Excellent data transfer speed over USBC3.0 to my Raspberry Pi NAS. Highly recommended!!!

Personally, I wouldn't trust the RAID controller (maybe for mirroring, but not for striping). Using mine as an enclosure for two 2.5" SSDs as part of a media centre setup. The drives aren't RAIDed, but it's not for anything I really care about. If one drive dies, I'll lose whatever is on it... but not the whole thing. In this setup it's just a dual USB - SATA adapter in a fairly nice box. With a power supply provided.Note that the fan will always be on if the USB is plugged in and the unit is powered, there is no temperature control of any kind. It's not super loud, but something to consider if you're planning on using it often. With SSDs the unit doesn't really need the fan, so I installed a small switch at the rear to control it. My drives haven't gone over 35 degrees even under heavy use (they're fine up to 40, but if you go much over that it starts to reduce the lifespan of the disk). Mechanical HDDs will need probably the fan.Enclosure seems well built. Trays are a bit plasticky, but I doubt you'll be swapping them about very often.Two lights per drive... Blue seems to be always on, red flashes when the drive is in use.

Super easy to set up and the manual is pretty good. One quibble is that what both the manual and label on the device call Normal and JBOD configuration modes, I would call JBOD and simple spanning. JBOD (called Normal for the device) gives you two separately mounted drives. Simple spanning (called JBOD for the device) catenates the storage on the drives together to give you one large volume. Initially, I have configured the disks as RAID-0 (striped) to give me higher throughput performance than simple spanning, but with no redundancy against drive failure. My eventual use case is to make backups, for which I shall reconfigure the device with higher capacity HDDs as RAID-1 (mirrored) to provide redundancy. Obviously, RAID-10 (combined striping and mirroring) is not an option with only two HDDs.The noise level is not very intrusive and isn't a concern given how I will be using it. It might not be suitable for accessing media files and a NAS solution might be more appropriate in that case.I purchased the enclosure for £52, which I consider good value given its capabilities.

seems to work ok although the power and data lights dont seem to work on ssd drives

Does exactly what it says in the blurb. I had two spare hard drives from updating my Synology RAID machines. These have now been put to use providing personal backup for my wife’s laptop. Easy to set up and easy to use with the Windows laptop.

Bought this item to use as a storage and back up for my new M4 Mac mini. Sadly it was a poor choice. Constant errors as the drives disconnect. After a few hours only one of the bays worked and so got more errors. Looks good solid built so 1 star but sadly not fit for purpose. Others have said it's possible to get some software online but I shouldn't have to. If you have a Mac I would steer clear. Saying that it could be the same issues on a PC but I haven't got one to try it on.

The product is well-made and solid; however, the fan is a bit noisy. Buyers might want to find some way to cushion the feet, which are solid if the enclosure is on a hard surface, such as a desk, as the vibration of the fan could be annoying. Don't expect a huge amount of support should you need it. I did get a quick response, but it soon became obvious that they were unable to help me to any great extent, so they stopped replying to my emails.I did eventually sort the problem myself by trial and error.

Okay bought with unit with some trepidation as the reviews seem to be mixed. I needed it for a RAID set up as I'd outgrown my existing single disk 18TB unit for my film collection.A few reviews have mentioned it's noisy or the background noise is a disturbance. Not in my case, the unit is whisper quiet and certainly no where near the noise level(s) of my old WD unit. I think the noise may possibly be down to the choice to HD's used. In my case I'm using a couple of Seagate Enterprise units. Now I know the Seagate HD name has a mixed reception regarding reliability but I've always found them 100% reliable recording to my NAS unit.Back to the Cenmate, it's a doddle to set up. No need (in my case) to use the supplied screw fixings and so far so good. So you can only speak as you find.