Description
SYBA SY-ENC50119 8 bay 2.5″ and 3.5″ USB3.0 SATA External Enclosure is a quick and simple way to expand storage capacity. Latest controller and firmware support 8 x 8TB drives.Unique independent switch designallows drives to be powered off individually, prolonging the life of the drives. SY-ENC50119 with USB 3.0 5Gbps Superspeed interface helps to transfer your files in a breeze,USB3.0 connection 10x Faster to USB2.0 and compatible with USB2.0,1.1,1.0. Plug and Play,No additional driver or utility needed.
From the manufacturer
Features
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Tool Less HDD TrayThe tool less tray design provides a simple way of HDD installation – simply slip the HDD into the tray and easily insert or withdraw the HDDs from the enclosure. |
Support SSD or HDDSupports 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA I/II/III hard disk drive up to 18TB per drive bay. |
Eight Individual Drive Bay8 Removable hard drive bay lets you access eight individual 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch hard drives simultaneously using a single USB 3.0 port. |
Flyboyron –
Nice box! It does exactly what I wanted it to do.I have had several external drives hooked to my iMac for various purposes, and for this reason, I’ve always been short of USB ports and really tired of all the power bricks for each drive. I had power strips and USB hubs and cables everywhere.This box is the perfect solution for that problem.I have mounted 5 bare drives in the 8 slots of my unit, getting rid of 4 USB port cables, an extra USB hub (that often gave me issues) and 5 separate power bricks. This thing cleaned up my computer setup immensely. The box is quiet (actually silent sitting on the floor next to my computer desk), compact, and in the month since I bought it, it’s worked perfectly. No unwanted disconnects, and hey, it just works!It has a master power switch on the lower left corner of the front, to shut off power to the entire unit. And each drive slot has a switch to power down just that drive. This is very handy, since the drives are hot-swappable, and this allows you to power down only the drive you want to change out, and power up a replacement when you’re ready. Within a minute or so of powering it up, the new drive appears in the computer’s drive list. This also allows you to have drives “off-line”, but ready to go at the touch of a button. All without dismounting the other drives in the unit.This enclosure is NOT a RAID device. Each drive shows up as a separate disk as if it were separately connected to the computer. You could create a RAID array with RAID software if you want, but the enclosure has no such capability built in. It’s a JBOD, “Just a Bunch Of Drives,” which is exactly what I needed.It’s not a NAS, either. It’s connected directly to the computer through USB (or a eSATA connection of you want), not to the network router. Its volumes can, however, be shared just like any other external drives within the capabilities of whatever OS you’re using. It works like a charm on my iMac, running Mojave, and the mounted drives show up fine in Windows 10 running under Parallels.(If you do as I did and use external drives removed from Seagate’s proprietary cases, you’ll probably have to reformat them once, because the Seagate interface does something funky to how they communicate. This box has a standard SATA interface for each slot, so any bare SATA drives will slip right in and work like a charm.) It works just like a generic external enclosure for each drive.Yes, the box has a plastic bezel in front, but the rest of the case is made of sturdy steel. (It looks and is made much like a black medium-sized tower PC case. ) The drive trays are made of fairly light plastic with a small metal insert at the front where the latching mechanism lives. But the latches are easy to operate (squeeze from the sides), and the trays are easy to insert and remove. If you’re just a bit careful with the trays when they’re removed, they will work fine.It would be nice if Syba sold the mounting trays separately, but to my knowledge they do not. The drive mounting trays do fit into the box well, the latches work, and there’s plenty of ventilation for the drives, with the high/low speed selection on the internal fan.The trays will work with standard 3.5″ drives or 2.5″ laptop-sized ones, and they are “toolless”, since you don’t need screws to mount standard drives. There are springy plastic fingers on the side of the tray that snap into the mounting hole locations on 3.5″ drives. The trays have holes in the bottom (and they give you little bags of the proper screws to mount 2.5″ laptop drives.)I did have one issue when I mounted a laptop drive. The back right side spring pin hit the side of the drive since there’s no hole there, so when you try to install the tray, the spring pin sticks out and makes it quite difficult to slide in. I think that particular spring pin would probably end up broken off if you did that very often. But if I was going to use those drives often, I’d probably just snap that back pin off in those trays anyway, because even with only 3 of the 4 pins in place, the drive would be more than adequately secured. So, small problem, easy solution.My only small gripe was that there was no natural place to put labels on the front of the drive trays to indicate what drive is where. You get up to 8 drive slots, depending on the configuration you buy, and after a while, it can get clumsy to keep referring to an external key as to what drive is in what slot.I solved that by designing and 3D printing a small 1-1/2″ wide by 1″ high T-shaped name plate that slides into the cooling vent between the latches (there’s plenty of other space for sufficient airflow). I put a printed DYMO label on each that’s easy to change if I need to. Now it’s easy to tell what’s where.I did order a longer USB 3.0 cable, because the 1m/3ft. cable that came with it wouldn’t easily reach to the back of the computer. When I test the speed on the drives, they are exactly the same speed as when they were individually connected before. (I didn’t test the eSATA interface.)All in all, this is exactly what I needed. I’m very happy with this Syba drive enclosure.
KDH4 –
Fantastic. Don’t believe everything you read. ***Update on Disconnects.Absolutely fantastic. Easy to set up. I had no problems of having to “set it on its side” to plug in drives, use a finger nail and pull back both sides of the ends of the rail locks, first one end then the other, drive drops in wiggle it a bit to make sure the rail locks pop into the drive holes, drive is locked into the tray and is tight, slide the tray with the hard drive in, push a little bit when you feel it at the connectors, push until the tray finger locks pop out and the tray is locked in. I did one drive then attached it to my WIN 11 machine, took a moment and it came up. Then I did the next drives with it “hot”. I did encounter that as a new drive is locked in the previous drives drop out and then come back in as it reads the new drive. I am using old computer drives of various sizes and they work perfectly. 500 Gb, 1 Tb, 3 Tb and 4 Tb. The 1 Tb was an old Win 10 OS drive and I was able to use Disc Management and Aomei Partition Assistant (Free) to delete the system partitions on it and recombine it into a single cohesive drive and “wipe” it (1s and 0s). I personally don’t like “hot swapping” drives or even USB thumb drives so I tend to shut down when making changes to a HDD assembly and use the USB remove feature. They always say “safe” to hot swap… yeah, right. I have mine on a 10 foot USB 3.1 cable and it is working perfectly. I also have not had any drives “sleep” on me when in use. I haven’t had any power outages (yet) and I don’t find it useful to test my luck with it. If I leave it on when I shut down my computer it comes right back on when I boot back up. The fan is super quiet and continues to blow cool air out with 4 drives in the bay. Speed of file storage and access read/write is phenomenal (IMO). Faster than a USB 3 Desk top external drive.I just bought a second one of these units. It is perfect for what I want.***UPDATE 6-17-2022***I have experienced the Disconnects of the drives. In my case I found it to be caused by WINDOWS 11 power settings. Do a Google search for external Drives Dropped in Windows 11 and you will find a solution for this. In Windows 11/10/8(?) there is a setting that you will have to search for. In WIN 11 it is: Type in to the search box on the task bar “Control Panel” then select System and Security, then select Power Options, then look for “CHANGE ADVANCED POWER SETTINGSAND Then you need to scroll farther down to find “USB SETTINGS” expand that to find “USB Selective Suspend setting”, expand that and then choose DISABLED and don’t forget to hit APPLY before exiting the menu or it won’t take affect.YOU WILL NOT find this using the normal settings menu, you will have to use the search bar and type in Control Panel to find these sneaky settings!
Dave –
Makes use of older drivesI didn’t know what to expect, but it seems to be as advertised. I put 7 – 2 TB drive and 1 – 1TB drive in the enclosure. I used Win 10 Storage Pool to create an array of about 8 TB with parity. Speed, I think, is limited by the quality of drives. Transfer rates to the array start at about 250MB/sec, but after about 15 seconds dropped dramatically. Transferring from the array was sustained at about 250MB/sec. I’m pretty sure the speed problem was the cache filling up on the old drives rather than the USB being the bottle neck.Buying a new 16 TB drive would be a better choice, but, if you have a pile of older drives sitting around, they can be made use of as an apparent single drive in the case. My impression, this is a decent product. Each drive can be turn on and off with a power button just to the left of each drive. Decent product.
Addicted to Amazon –
Happy with product,I didn’t need a NAS, so I bought the best thing. The cost was very decent. I have 8 external drives. I’m already using 6 of bays. This was an easy install and no issues. It was nice to de-cluuter the area and to have the drives active than just sitting inactive. One for plug 8 drives. I’m happy. So far I havent paid attention to the hear didpersion. One thing I wish it would have been built with ia a fan blowing out from the top. Otherwise I very satified so far. I will update this review if I have issues.
L. M. Celani –
A GREAT ENCLOSURE. THIS IS NOT A RAID ENCLOSUREThis fit the need to have 4 high capacity drives all ino ne place. I don’t like RAID arrays because of past experiences. The drives installed easy and it was plug and play all the way. With windows remembering the letters it assigned to things like portable USB drives you may have to assign a drive letter if Windows canIf you get the UDB connection tones and your drives do not appear (be sure each drive bay LED is green) go to the search box and type “create” and from the menu, select “Create or Format hard disk” and once loaded, you will see the drives in the enclosure. Right click and select “Assign drive letter” and from tye nerxt window select ADD. If there us a drive lettrer already, select change. Pick a drive letter and select OK. That drive and the new letter will appeari n Windows File explorer.. A BIG plus is the built in power supply which means no bigThe enclosure is nice and quiet and the large fan moves a lot of air to krrp the drives cool.Another BIG PLUS is the built in power supply meaning no big wall wort using 3 or more outlets on a power strip.
Ted c. –
Can not use two units at onceI really enjoy this product. So much that I bought another one I tried to use both of them together in unison simultaneously. I have not been able to get It’s work 2 units at the same time. Has anybody else experience this same problem
Brad & May –
Nice and easy solution, not for performanceDon’t expect awesome performance, but it’s an effective archive solution. I’m using it with ZFS under Ubuntu to hold backups and I’m pleased so far.
SnyderCountry –
Great Value OptionI purchased a mini-computer from Lenovo which included a solid-state C drive and room to add a second drive. I elected to not add a second drive, to maintain a light workload on the tiny computer. This Syba SY-ENC50104 is a perfect solution, taking up only one USB port on the computer. I have it loaded with 4 drives, and this set up works great as a Plex Server and Home Office computer. There is a bit of fan noise, but not enough to be a distraction, and at some future point I may remedy this by loading it with only solid-state drives so the fans won’t need to run as often. I handed off my huge Dell OptiPlex Tower to my daughter, so now I have more space and less clutter in my home office.
Jereme –
Perfect for non-raid Plex setupThis was exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t want a hardware raid setup. I just wanted to be able to have multiple drives connected to my Plex server. So far this thing has been perfect. Now I know that I can easily add a new drive when I need to increase my storage capacity.
Union ice the werhouses –
Best budget enclosure. Not cheap and not Amazing but sturdy enough.It’s the perfect budget enclosure, no problems. Just don’t hot swap while drives are running. Not noise in general, fan works well, I love the thing.