D5-300C: 5-bay USB3.1 5Gbps Type C RAID Enclosure Supports 2+3 RAID Mode

I had a similar unit to this from a different company and finally got sick of it trashing the drives and purchased this as a replacement. I kind of wish I'd bought one of these to start with. It has been sitting on my desk with five 6tb drives humming away pleasantly since I unpacked it and no sign so far of any adverse behaviour. The LEDs are unobtrusive, the power button responsive and data transfer more than satisfactory. As soon as I have the spare cash I will be buying a couple more to replace my other bays as this one not only seems more reliable, it's more user friendly.The primary difference with this one compared to my other stacks is that the hard drives need to be fixed into caddies. All you need is supplied, the caddies, screws, a screw driver, and it only takes a couple minutes to fix the drives and slot them home. While the bays cannot be locked shut, the door is quite a positive fix and does not open randomly on it's own. However it is necessary to make sure that it is out of reach of small inquisitive fingers who might think there are treats behind the shiny doors.I also rather like the way RAID works on this unit. You can either have all five drives as individual units or set it up so the first two are a RAID array and keep the last three drives as individuals. Makes things a bit more versatile, and allows you to run the unit as you want, instead of being locked into one choice only.The unit is quite nicely made, with finished edges and no sharp corners or rough edges. My only less than ideal observation is that the drive doors are plastic rather than alloy. I would have preferred that these were made of a more rigid and tougher material. But, that's a small thing at the end of the day, as once you've mounted the drives, there's no real need to be opening and closing the doors regularly. Power up and down is quick and without fuss and the unit runs fairly quietly compared to other similar boxes. The nice thing with this, it that it is relatively unobtrusive. It is designed in such a way that it sites on the desk without climbing in your face, and doesn't have that "big ugly man box" presence that so many other drive bays seem to have. Simple, versatile and compared to my other units - so far reliable. You can't ask for more than that.Overall, I'm very pleased with this item, and won't hesitate to buy another one later on.

I purchased 2 years ago, to be the main storage of my home server, and I think I have used it long enough to finally review it.TL;DRGo for this if you need multiple drives (4/5) or want RAID configuration (either hardware or software). Pretty good value and virtually no downtime.-----------------------Install:-----------------------This is pretty much plug and go, you put your drives and it should work out of the box, no firmware needed.-----------------------My use case:-----------------------I slotted in 4 1TB HDD with software RAID 5 and use it as my Linux home server main storage and it works pretty well. The only caveat on Linux is you will need to disable USB power saving otherwise it will disconnect the drives after awhile, this was 2 years ago so it might have been fixed.The reason why I chose this instead of cheaper ones with 4 slots was that if you are using this for RAID, you can choose between RAID 5 and RAID 6.I did not try the RAID 0/1 configuration since it doesn't fit my use case anyway and I can do that in software as well.The drive activity lights are also quite helpful as well to see if the configuration is correct, if so the ones configured will be used thus flashing.-----------------------Maintainance:-----------------------I have used it for 2 years and there's no downtime to be honest, all the downtimes were from something else that is not related to the enclosure.-----------------------Noise and R/W speed-----------------------As for the noise, I think the hard drives and computers would definitely be louder than the fan in the enclosure.I can upload and download files reasonably fast, watching videos is also fine too. I am not expecting too much from this because 4 drives are using the same USB to transfer data.Not saying it is slow but I recommend using it for things that do not require fast R/W speed, such as home server, data backup, cold data storage, etc... andI would not recommend using it for things like video editing, gaming, boot drive, etc. If you have to, maybe use a USB-C to USB-C cable as suggested from other people.-----------------------Price:-----------------------It is definitely competitive to other vendors, even though this is a "known brand" one. If you don't need RAID or don't need 5 drives, go for the ones with 4 or 2 slots, which is quite a bit affordable.Kudos to TERRAMASTER for not increasing the price for the past 2 years (189.99)

After much deliberation I chose the D5-300C because the transfer speed without the RAID controller on all disk appeared to be better based on Terramaster docs. Also I planned using the enclosure as a JBOD software array. I had 3 options to use this DAS which is intended for long term archive backups. Option one was to use it with Unraid natively, as someone else has pointed out this will not work well as the two disks that are controlled with the RAID controller do not expose the disk details to unraid. So that would not work. My other option was passing the device through to my virtual machine. Now this might work if your hardware can pass the whole USB interface of your board but for me this will not work as in linux it was impossible to separate out the controllers for the disks into separate entities. So my remaining plan for this was to use it with MS Storage Spaces and created a RAID 1 array (so one big disk). This so far is working well and has worked for my backup purposes. Have also kept one disk bay free for disk testing and have completed 3 disk tests so far. I tested performance by copying the same 10gb file to 2 disks simultaneously from my PC while also simultaneously copying the same file between 2x disks on the box. For me that resulted in all 4x disks transferring at their maximum transfer speed (about 150MB/s). So for me the performance was ample. So far after quite heavy use in a short space of time I have had no errors or issues with transfers / disks / etc. Also would mentioned that using with Win10 the drive works natively and spins down the disks when not in use and spins down all disks when you shutdown / hibernate or standby.