4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with Cooling Fan for 2.5/3.5" SATA HDD/SSD With USB A/C 3.0＋eSATA Cable, 3.5 Hard Drive Reader Supports 80TB Capacity(NO RAID/NAS)

I used this for two external Hard drives I had that I could never get to work properly WD 1 Tb & 2Tb. I removed them from their original casing and placed then easily into two of the drawers on this 4 bay HD enclosure. I also had an old tower computer from 2002. I used it quite often for photos etc - it was never connected to the internet. The computer stopped working and I was worried I lose all my doc and photos. I removed the hard drives and placed them into the other two drawers. I connected this to my laptop. It easily opens up and I now can access everything that was on my old computer and I have masses of storage - it is simple to use. It makes a slight noise when on - I assume a fan or something which I'd expect. I have got rid of my tower computer which gives me a lot more space! It is neat and portable and great for me to archive all old scanned photos etc . Hopefully it continues to impress me - so far so good.

I had a couple of 1Tb WD drives sat in a draw doing nothing, so I decided to give the Cenmate 2 a test to see if I could get some value out of them. The drives clicked into the caddies OK and fitted perfectly. I set them to RAID 1 and connected to the Synology, the drives appeared but weren't in a RAID 1 configuration. I then discovered that you have to press the reset button (for 10 secs) to change the RAID level in the Cenmate 2. Did this and everything worked perfectly (I would have given 5 stars, but the manual is small and hard to read).Hyper Backup on the Synology was able to access the drive and works well.

Original review is below - now that the initial issue is sorted, time for a proper review.This 4-Bay no-RAID CENMATE unit _does_ work well. My drives fitted straight in there (Seagate IronWolf) with none of the supplied just-in-case screws needed. They were already formatted and loaded with data - and this just worked - no initialisation, no re-copying or whatever. Maybe my system is different to other disappointed reviewers: the disks are XFS formatted and worked previously in an UnRaid server, and then in an ancient ICYBOX enclosure hooked up to a Raspberry Pi running Open Media Vault - as they are in this CENMATE box.Anyway, it's shovelling data round like a boss, so I'm happy and would buy another.------- earlier review from the day of purchase------This works, and seems to work well... but I had to use my own power supply. I thought maybe the supplied unit would work with a UK 'shaver adapter', but it doesn't.Amazon doesn't seem to let me get in touch with the vendor; I could send the whole lot back, but now it's here and in use...Update:Aha! The vendor saw this and made contact. All sorted amicably. Thanks :)

Have not managed to get it working even though the discs fitted in very nicely. Issues from previous reviews about fitting 3.5" seem to have been resolved. Lots of lashing lights but drives not recognised. Awaiting reply from support. Will revise view depending on their reply.

I had a Western Digital NAS drive that was no longer supported. Removed the drives from the NAS and re-formatted them. Slid them to the Cenmate 4, and it was then simply plug and play. One thing to note, it is essentially a USB drive, so it needs to be 'ejected' to close it down correctly, before the computer is turned off. It is currently working a treat, and shows up as 1,2,3 or 4 separate internal hard drives in Windows explorer.

They say one thing on paper..... But please, here are the instructions now.1) make sure usb is connected to something2) power off3) set dip switches to normal mode4) HOLD reset button BEFORE you flick the ON switch (10 second hold)5) now you can set dips to whatever RAID and repeat steps 1 to 4Is that so hard to document?

I use this to clone my drive C: every two days and it works a treat.

When i got this i was under the impression i could just pop in my 2 old western digital hard drives and connect it up that way, but I've now realised that they would have to be taken out of there enclosure which mine are sealed, these hard drives are very old so i don't know if new ones are easier to open to access the raid drive to install in this device, as for the raid hard drive enclosure it seems well built and everything is included, good quality and value for setting up more storage space in the one unit.