SABRENT 5-Bay USB 3.2 Gen 2 SATA Docking Station for 3.5” HDD/SSD, 10Gbps USB-C DAS, Tray-Less Hot-Swap, Aluminum Enclosure with 120mm Cooling Fan, Individual Power Switches, No RAID (DS-SC5B)

Solid, stable, and fast.
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.

An excellent enclosure if you don’t need RAID
This is for the 5-bay usb-c version.start with the bad, hence 4 star:1. it drops connection sometimes when use usb-A to usb-c cable connecting to usb-A 3.0 port on a thinkpad T470. it happens when creating soft-raid and writting to 4 HDDs at the same time. I had to use usb-c to usb-c cable, which runs robustly.2. sometimes, it will slow down for a while before picking up to full speednow the positive sides, which are quite many1. when using usb-c to usb-c connection with thinkpad T470, it has been rock solid. I have been running windows storage space in 4 disk parity on it and wrote > 1TB to it, and never had once disconnection2. HDD install is extremely easy and the door mechanism is strong so that I don’t worry HDD falls out if move around.3. the back circuit board does not block airflow, large opening between HDD and fan. sustained writing at full speed to 4 HDD for half hour, HDD still ~35C.4. fan is very quiet. similar to one in my synology NAS5. individual HDD has its own power button, you can shot-swap without worrying short-circuit anything. but it does create initial confusion as I was wondering why nothing happened after I pushed the main switch on the back6. HDD and fan power down when HDDs are inactive and with computer power down. naturally, it resumes also with computer power-on7. throughput has been great. can sustain writting to 4 HDD at 150MB/sec8. usb-c hub allows expansion in future, although I have not tested it yet.9. the led lights are quite small and do not feel disturbed by itI have looked through, twice, every single 4/5 bay usb-c enclosure; I do feel this is the best one, not one of, if you don’t need hardware RAID.update after a week. moved 10TB of data both to it and from it. all done with storage space in parity, meaning 4 HDD writing/reading at the same time. rock solid. did not disconnect or slow down even once. excellent.update after 6 months. 24×7 for the last 6 months. Absolutely no problem. no single disconnect. still quiet as day-one. no complaints.

To start I wish Sabrent would spend some more time providing detailed and correct specs about the unit. I say this because the box and the instructions say that it has a 120mm fan? Yet on other areas of that same box and online it says 90mm? Which is it? Guess you need to buy it to find out huh?Also, I asked a question here about whether this unit supports the UASP protocol. The answer I recieved here was “No, it uses the older USB3.0 BOT transfer method which is still plenty fast.” This is incorrect information. This unit in fact DOES support UASP which stands for USB Attached SCSI Protocol. I was SHOCKED and DELIGHTED to have discovered this when hooking up the unit to my PC. This allows for faster read/write data speeds to and from storage devices. Compared to traditional USB 3.0 BOT, UASP performs up to 70% faster read speeds and 40% faster write speeds at peak performance. It has to be the FASTEST unit I’ve ever used when accessing information off of a hard disk drive. I’m very impressed with the build quality of this unit and ease of installation when placing drives in the tooless bay slots. I have installed 4x 18TB Seagate Exos @ 7,200RPMs. Drives at idle are 29C and when under load don’t go over 40C.Lastly, don’t know what all the fuss is about over the loudness of the fan? It’s very quiet, and doesn’t bother me at all. The unit sits on top of my tower right on on my desk about 3-4 feet away from me. The only thing I hear are the low noise fans comming from my PC case. The Sabrents fan on the enclosure when I place my ear near it is quieter than my PC, and I have a quiet PC. So, I suspect one of two things in regards to the popular “the fan is too loud” postings: Either people got a defective fan from the get go, or Sabrents quietly released a new revision of the unit with a much quieter fan. I was researching ahead of time about possibly replacing the fan as others have when the unit arrives, but there is no need as it’s whisper quiet.This is a fantastic enclosure.A bit on the pricey side but I got the bonus of finally having a unit with UASP.

Able to take my drives from old computers and just plug them in and they were a Mix of old and new drives and SSDs everything worked