Mediasonic PROBOX 4 Bay DAS 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure – USB 3.0 eSATA Support 30TB HDD (HF2-SU3S3)

Replaced an old Proliant Micro server (NxxL 1st gen) that would keep losing cheap Flex ATX power supplies every year or two. Was looking for a replacement that also had 4 bays, low power consumption and no need for RAID to drive a headless Linux media NAS with several Docker apps installed. Paired it with an older EliteDesk USFF which was already doing other related duties. Fit and finish is fantastic, better than expected. It's still slightly on the cheesy side and the lights are excessively bright (I'd recommend some black tinting tape). Drive installation was very easy. Much smaller than I expected. Options are dead simple and you basically know how to operate it from the small labelled picture on the folded quick start guide. Fans are quiet, even on max, although I'm not yet sure how well they are cooling the drives. Auto-sleep function also works well (I wouldn't use the auto-off as it fully powers down and doesn't power back up). I have been using it in USB mode since I am using a tiny, slim desktop with no expansion options and it has worked well so far. Drives were detected right away. I have not yet gained S.M.A.R.T. visibility but hope to at least get a basic "healthy" status. It's not technically supported (Linux that is) so not something I'd ding it for since I can read :-) Really nice unit so far. If all goes well, may pickup the 8-bay version for my backups. MAY 2025 UPDATE - Still running strong, no new fan noise/vibration, good disk health, never once had to reset due to disk communication loss. Have had power loss in my home where I had to manually turn the enclosure back on, but basically non-issue. Maybe people have problems with the USB 3.2 version and/or RAID? Was happy to see Mediasonic back in stock so immediately ordered the 8-bay eSATA/USB 3.0 when it became available. Both connection options exceed the network connectivity to the attached PC so no need for 3.2

This mediasonic probox 4 bay enclosure is exactly what I needed! I have two 14TB Seagate exos X16 enterprise HDDs in it hooked up to my PC using eSATA VIA a 10Gtek eSATA to PCie card (also purchased here on Amazon) and it works great! I did install and update the 10Gtek driver before I hooked the mediasonic enclosure to my computer. The drivers for the 10Gtek card is no where to be found if you search for 10Gtek drives BUT this card is based on the ASMedia ASM1061 chip so I went to ASMedias websites and found the driver there. Once that driver was installed, I hooked the mediasonic probox enclosure up and turned it on and windows 11 recognized both my drives with no issues! For me, It was easy to open and install the drives. Yes, as mentioned by others here, the front blue lights are bright when its on but it doesn't bother me because I have it under my desk where its not really visible and plus I don't leave it on all the time. I only turn it on when I have to make a backup of something. I have the fan on high because fan noise doesn't bother me, plus all I'll about keeping components as cool as possible. On high, yes it is very noticeable but on medium, it is barely audible to me from about 3 feet away where it sits. And speaking cooling, it does a good job of keeping my drives cool. At Idle, according to crystaldiskinfo, they sit at about 34c-36c. I copied 4 TB of data to both drives and even copying for 10+ hours straight, neither drive got above 45C. I should mention I copied data to one drive at a time and not simultaneously so I can't speak to how the the temps would be doing more then one at time. Copy time was as I expected for 7200RPM drives in the range of 60MB/s to 220MB/s with an average of about 80MBs-110MB/s. I had a lot of very small files in the transfer so speeds where up and down. I am also using a 6FT eSATA cable and no issues with that length. I have not used USB nor do I plan on it so I can't speak to how that performs but I'm sure its good. I had read that eSATA can be a little more reliable and stable when transferring large amounts of data at a time so since I had planned on moving 4+ TB at a time, I specially went with eSATA. So far, I'm more then pleased with purchasing the mediasonic probox enclosure and will definitely purchase another one if I ever need another in the future!

I have gone thru 5 other brand's 18+ tb rated enclosures and they either wouldn't mount or refused to allow read/write to my DC HC655 drives. I didn't want this enclosure due to the soft power button and therefore inability to be controlled by a Kasa plug for remote desktop use, but it turns out this is the enclosure I need because it works and I'm tired of experimenting. I was running it door off fan high restrictive fan grille deleted and maintaining 36°c under load with the room at 72°f. With the grille fan high was 39°, with the grille and door closed fan high it hit 43° but I didn't like that and opened it before the drives got hotter; it would likely end up higher as it hadn't been on for long. The drive lights got green masking tape covered in black marker to prevent eyeball damage as they're ridiculously bright. Swapped the short AC cord for a 6 foot one so the brick can sit on the desk and not be hanging from the plug as the DC cord is also too short to reach from floor to desk. Upgraded it with a Noctua pwm (stronger than 3 pin) fan but reverted back to the original noisy one as it moves more air and keeps things several degrees cooler than the brown fan. Now running an Arctic P8 Max fan, quieter and stronger than stock, 34°c under load fan high no door no grille. You'll need a micro ph-2mm 2 pin to 3/4 pin adapter and m2.5x35mm screws to stick a nice 80x25mm fan on this thing. The stock fan is 80x20mm and the 27mm screws are barely long enough for it. Enclosure bottlenecks and achieves only ~390 mb/s (3.12 gbps) when all four drives are accessed simultaneously with each drive just shy of 100 mb/s. The 5 gbps rating is rubbish as two drive access also hovers around 390 mb/s though my drives are capable of 220 mb/s each. Computer is a 13900hx powered Legion in performance mode so it's plenty fast for the task and the speed fault lies with the enclosure.

To start off, taking a brand new unit out of the box and noticed the front door latch is loose and would not stay closed. Then I noticed how cheap the housing and material is. The power supply is very light which is made in China and unbranded, I don't have any faith in it and doubt it will last long. It has poorly thought out ventilation, despite having a very loud fan. The logic board that connects the HDD's is right in front of the fan and blocks the air completely. It also doesn't support the new 4kn sector format for HDD's and they don't list anything about that in their description (despite claiming a newer 2022 chipset in the title). The eSATA port requires a port multiplier support on the motherboard. Not many consumer boards have that and they should also list that in their product description. Which is the whole reason I purchased this unit. Eventually, I was able to get (4) 16TB drives up and running via USB in windows storage spaces, although I had to convert them from 4kn to 512e first. Another review mentioned that windows storage spaces doesn't allow USB. This isn't entirely true. I just had to switch from quick removal to better performance in device manager / disk drives / each drive / policies.

I've been very happy with this drive cabinet, which I used to create a three-disk RAID (parity) array for weekly backups, with the remaining slot as a seperate drive for additional storage. Pros: Quiet fan even on High. Extremely simple disk installation The choice of USB 3 or eSATA (I used eSATA) Configuration on the front panel for Power, Fan and other Modes is simple to use and handy to have for setting things up Throughput has been very good and I have no reason to believe that will change It's pretty quiet, though to be fair it's not on my actual desk but in a server closet and as I said set up for backups. Entirely reasonable price It "looks" nice though... (see below) Cons: It does look nice but it feels a lot lighter than I'd have preferred. The front panel especially is kind of cheap feeling, but then again: For what this thing is, it IS pretty cheap, right? But setting aside the weight of the front panel, what I really would prefer is just better ventilation! You've got a nice sized fan on the back, but only a little slot up front. I may take the front panel and machine some ventilation holes or slots into it (I have a shop). I don't want to remove the panel completely though because it seems like the drives are a little too exposed at that point because... No real "locking" mechanism for the drives. I mean sure, they won't just slide out, but they still feel like they should be a bit more secure than they are. Anyway: again for the price, you're getting some serious value here, and none of the Cons are enough to not reccomend it, which I most definitely do.

Edit: another reviewer, who posted after I did, states that this "does not support drive sizes above 8 (eight) TB". This is incorrect. I have four 12TB drives in mine, no issues. I use this unit to contain some back-up drives that I periodically sync to. As another knowledgeable user reported, ventilation is poor while the front door is closed. Therefore, I knew this before I bought it and I was monitoring my hard drive temperatures with an app (CrystalDiskInfo) & noticed they went into the red (over heating, potentially damaging the drive/s) while I was syncing with the front door was closed. I should have just removed the front door before using it, but I had to test it and know for myself. Luckily, the front door can be left open, and is easily detached (in fact, it'll probably fall right off if you slightly bump/touch the unit or door while it's open, so you may as well just remove it while in use) and the temps dropped back down into a normal operating range. The same app that monitors my drive temps also indicates that their health is still good, so no permanent damage most likely. Otherwise, installing the drives and setting everything up in Windows was very easy and straight forward. In general, this unit works very well for its intended purpose, and transfer speeds are good, but the over-heating issue is rather important (considering the value I put on my personal data). I'd rather not have to remove parts to make something work properly, and then reinstall them when I'm finished (to keep dust out).

For the price I cant complain, does what it needs to do with a decent footprint and good speed. Using 3 12tb drives in windows storage spaces parity and was getting 240MB/ps sustained writes. Took me a bit under 24 hours to transfer my entire plex library from my old server to this over gigabit and had fans at max speed on the box which kept the drives at about 38-40c. My one and only complaint is the auto fan speed sensor is set wrong by design. This is the stock fan speed specs for the box based on temps Below 45°C (1200rpm - Low), 45°C-54°C (1800rpm - Medium), Higher than 55°C (2500rpm - High). From my research you want consumer nas drives to sit at 40c or under ideally but definitely under 45 and you MAY get reduced life if ran at 45c and up for prolonged periods, this is how the auto fan should of been tuned Below 38°C (1200rpm - Low), 40°C-45°C (1800rpm - Medium), Higher than 50°C (2500rpm - High). On high fan speed setting the noise is fine BUT if you take off the front cover for more airflow the noise essentially doubles but only for a couple C temp savings so not really worth it unless in a wardrobe or tucked away Edit: yesterday while doing some light reads and writes I noticed the drive temps got upto 47c while set on auto mode but it was not hot enough to trip the ambient air sensor in the case to increase fan speed, I suspect the drives will need to get to like 50c or so before the auto fan adjusts the speed so just going to let it run at full fan speed now to be safe.

I've had this up and running for about six weeks now and I'm quite impressed. I was originally going to use this with my Synology as external storage, but decided to attach it to another machine that's constantly running so that it can be backed up to the cloud and it's been doing great. My only complaint is that it doesn't automatically recover after a power outage, but that's spelled out on the product page.

I got my original boxes that were USB 2.0 and eSATA and have used them non-stop for over 10 years... they are simple to use but required a esata card with port multiplier to use, which made them a bit complicated to set up. The only situation I had for all those years was a power supply for one that died and had to be replaced. When COVID hit, one of the boxes died and I replaced it with a newer esata/USB 3.0 model but it was used as all new stock were impossible to find. And 2 years later, that is the box that has now died on me, but it is possible that it's due to power surges and such as these last few months, the city has had a lot of problems due to many storms and such, and it may have also damaged my UPS that should have prevented damage to my devices including these boxes... I'll never know. But that said, this box is replacing that other one (and is the exact same) and I will hope that it will last as long as my other older boxes that are still going strong so far. These boxes are simple to use, with only one annoyance of needing a small handle to be installed on the drives. The fans are very silent and aside the situation that requires me to get a replacement, have been very solid and working very well for a lot of year. In time I will most probably need to replace them for a more modern setup as the old boxes are supposedly limited to 4TB drives (while the newer ones are able to use much larger drives) and will switch to USB 3.0 (or better) and leave the eSATA in the past so to prevent the headaches I've had due to that. I almost went with the 8-bay boxes, but reviews have been alarming in reference to the number of issues that people have had compared to the 4-bay ones, so I'll have to see when the time comes. But for now, these boxes have been great, have been through constant use (24/7) and I've enjoyed them greatly, and for a price range that left all competition far behind.

Bought this to house 4x SATA drives from a broken PC. Really easy to assemble and place the drives, and no problems accessing them once seated. Intructions are fairly idiot-proof as well.

Works well as a JBOD, good data transfer speed. Front cover is held down by a flimsy plastic catch the broke on the second opening.

I have bought 4 of these over a 5+ Years. 1 for a friend, 2 currently active and 1 that died after 4+ years. Using only 1 USB 3 Port and 1 Power Socket for 4 hard drives is amazing, and super simple to set up. 2 screws in each hard drive for the "handle" and it comes with the basic screwdriver. I love these units.

Good but came with US power plug and I needed AU, not option to specify otherwise and ccanot be bothered with the hassle of contacting support.