Yottamaster 5 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure, Aluminum USB3.0 External HDD Enclosure for 2.5"/3.5" SATA HDD/SSD, 5X16TB Hard Drive Caddy with 80mm Cooling Fan-[PS500U3]

Product Information

Above, you can see the front and front-side view of the DF4RU3. It looks stylish and has a nice aesthetic. The design reminds me of Apple’s Power Mac G5 desktop PC. It is mostly metal on the outside making it very sturdy and robust. Whereas, its sides are covered with a clear acrylic side panel. With this enclosure the output of the command ls /dev/disks/by-id corresponded to “serial number of the case.DISK1” and commands like udevadm could only see the data of the enclosure instead of the data of the drives. Speaking of the fan, in a quiet room, the fan noise is audible. But I don’t consider it as loud or obnoxious. Some people may consider this as “noisy”, especially if they are used to very silent conditions. However, in my years of using a PC and testing several components with fans, like graphics cards or CPU coolers, the DF4RU3 isn’t the loudest I heard. However, I would not use any hard drive or external hard drive enclosure for gaming, especially if they are limited in speed. That would only increase loading time and some elements, effects, or texture may not load instantly with a slow hard disk drive. I’ve made a DIY NAS with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a couple of external USB 3.5" drives. I am planning on adding more drives but I am fearing the mess of cables that comes with that. To avoid it, I bought an external enclosure with 5 bays (Orico 9558u3) but I had to return it since, when trying to import the pool, it didn’t recognize the drives of the pool for their /dev/disks/by-id but rather for sdx.

I did not disassemble my unit since I do not want to damage it unintentionally. Here’s a peek of what’s inside the DF4RU3 from the drive bay’s view. You can see the SATA power and data ports from this angle. Connect the "HUB" port of the enclosure (device 1) to the "Main" port of the enclosure (device2) with the C to C data cable. Each device needs to be connected to an AC power supply separately. "Main" port refers to the main data transfer port and "HUB" port is the serial port. On the flip side, aside from storing your non-active game folders, the DF4RU3 is a great solution for storing your gameplay recordings, and other large file-sized media. So, for gaming-specific use, I wouldn’t use this. But for media storage, yes, this is definitely a useful storage solution. Other than the nice (RGB) lighting of the fan, there is (really) nothing to see from the inside. You can partially see the power supply area, and the Blue LED indicator for each drive bay. Nevertheless, the transparent side panels do look nice overall. Just be careful not to scratch it since it is not scratch resistant. Yottamaster RAID Manager SoftwareThe unit that I got didn’t come with the latest firmware. And I was informed that it is recommended that I upgrade to the latest firmware since it includes some fix. In my opinion, the Yottamaster DF4RU3 is best to be used with hard disk drives and not SSDs. You’ll lose more or less half of the performance if you use an SSD due to the limitation of the USB 3.0 interface. If you want something faster, you might want to consider the Yottamaster FS4C3 instead. Since it uses a USB3.1 Type-C interface, capable of 10Gbps theoretical transfer rate.

It also supports 8 different RAID modes. You can choose from RAID 0,1,3,5 or 10 and can be configured to clone a drive or just use it as “normal” or JBOD. For now, I use mine in normal mode since I still need additional drives. I don’t have any major concerns at this point, as the product is working as expected. But I wouldn’t recommend this for SSD use. Who is this for? Picatoste if you you only have one pool, using the /dev/sdx probably won’t be a problem itself, as the drives could all be mixed up, (zfs would just deal with it) unless a USB boot drive is listed as a /dev/sdx device (sd cards list as /dev/mmcblk, rather than /dev/sdx) According to Yottamaster, this is their first attempt to include an RGB fan in their product. Due to the limitations of the PCB design, they can not add additional features or controls for the RGB fan. The fan is just for aesthetics since they are marketing this external enclosure to gamers, streamers, and content creators.At the time of writing this review, the DF4RU3 can support up to 64TB of storage capacity. That’s 16TB each drive bay. Currently, the Seagate IronWorlf Pro, Seagate Exos X16, and WD Red PRO are some of the drives that have 16TB capacities. And they are also available in 18TB capacity. Although, I am not sure if Yottamaster will release a firmware in the (near) future that would enable the DF4RU3 to support 18TB hard drives or 72TB in total. I don’t see any vibration dampening on the tray or inside the drive bays. But vibration coming from the hard drives doesn’t seem to be an issue. Also notice that there is a bit of performance drop. Just a tiny bit, by a few megabytes per second. I doubt that it will be noticeable at all in real-world use. Okay, time to wrap up this review. Pricing and Availability