Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have always liked, trusted and purchased Sabrent products. Thought I could purchase this as a cheap man's attached storage to use as a DVR to my mini Win 10 HTPC. I have Synology DS409slim and DS416slim 2.5" NAS boxes and thought this could give me similar capability as a side mounted USB external drive on the cheap. Tried though I might I could not make it work. Sadly, even with it's low price, because of its limitations I can't see any functional use for this product at all. In the end I purchased another DS416slim and relegated DVR duties to my DS409slim. As advertised the drives are accessible at flash SSD speeds. The drives are easily installed and it looks as if this enclosure can accommodate even 15mm tall drives. This product had the possibility of displacing the DS4XXslim series as the only 4 bay 2.5" device on the market. Sad that it misses this mark by a large margin Fan First of its certainly nice that it has a fan, however you'll probably never want turn it on. It is very loud. If you fill this box with SSD's you don't need it. However if you use HDD's with the lid on without the fan they will surely overheat. Just one HDD in this box without the fan, ran so hot I was concerned the drive would fail prematurely. They should have given the option to set the fan speed. LED lights. The LED's are overly bright. It would be nice to dim them or turn them off entirely. Surely a minor issue but annoying when you turn off the lights and watch TV with this in the room. Not Hot Swappable This was the deal breaker. When drives are plugged in, the other installed drives rebooted. Sometimes the drives did not reinstall themselves and remained offline. I used a mix of SSD's from Samsung, Crucial and Silicon Power and a WD HDD. Although the ardvert says "Hot Swappable" I did not find it to be the case. If I formatted a drive and then unplugged and then reinstalled to the same slot, frequently the drive would not reappear in Windows Explorer. I could take that same drive and put it into a different enclosure (Sabrent EC-RDSV) and it would display with a drive letter properly in Explorer. Put it back into the DS-4SSD and the drive is still unreadable. Move a drive to any of the other slot of the DS-4SSD and you risk it being unreadable. I tried combining multiple drives into one using Disk Manager. Win 10 would not allow this. I tried doing the same thing in Storage Spaces in Win 10. Often it would fail to work though I tried many different drive combinations. Each and every time when it did allow the DS-4SSD to create a Storage Space, in a short time it would post an error saying one of the drives was not available. Often the Storage Space could not be removed and the SSD's and HDD were "bricked". I had to find a Win 7 computer and use Disk Manager and the Diskpart command to recover them. Once some of these drives had been "bricked" and recovered, the DS-4SSD would not only not recognize them, but plugging these in would sometime make the other "unbricked" drives disappear. Incidentally I was able to use two Sabrent EC-RDSV enclosures and create and remove Storage Spaces with my drives without incident. There is something wrong with the product or my copy of it. It is not easy to reach out to Sabrent to get support. No tech support phone number. This product in my opinion has a lot of promise. If it worked it could have been valued much higher. However as it is it was a waste of a week of my time and $60.00. My wife after seeing all my frustrated attempts to get this working urged me to buy another $300 DS416slim. I put all of my "bricked" and "un-"bricked" drives into it. It formatted them without incident, combined them into a RAID5 partition using SHR. I created an iSCSI share that was designated as the D drive. I configured my Silicon Dust DVR onto the iSCSI share and went to bed peacefully for the first time in a week. Sabrent, sorry. Wanted to like this. Couldn't. Regards All and Good Night