SABRENT USB 3.0 4 Bay 2.5” Docking Station with Fan

I needed a better storage option than a NAS, we were hitting the road fulltime in our RV and a NAS just was not logical Looking for in purchase: -Sturdy -Value -Multiple drive bays -Power through USB (not mandatory) -SSD compatible -Compact Design: The Sabrent USB 3.0 nailed almost all the boxes. Small, compact, great price, 4 drives, had a fan (which you could turn off) and it looked good. It has a separate power cord, which was not a deal breaker (and actually I liked that after I thought about plugging it into my UPS) Issues: The fan is a bit loud, but honestly I don’t even turn it on unless I am writing a significant amount to it. Positives: ++Material ++Look ++Design ++Build Quality ++Cost ++Transfer speeds ++Fan (when needed) Negatives: --None Final Thoughts: I love this it is exactly what a person needs, if you don’t need the NAS for distributed use or a security system. The product looks great and performs perfectly, transfer speeds are not limited to the 1Gig network line anymore, they are limited by the drive space. The other advantage is you can swap out drives as you need them, it works as if it is four separate portable SSDs. This is really a great option to a NAS and I pleased to downsize while upsizing my transfer rates. Would I recommend: Absolutely I would. Buy this now

The title doesn't even cover it! This product was beautifully and thoughtfully packaged and shipped. It is beautiful, rugged and performs as advertised and exceeded my expectations. I put 4 (2) TB drives in it, spinning seagate drives and realized when you turn the unit on, the fan doesn't automatically come on, - you will need to press the button for the fan. What I do is, turn the fan on first, then power on the drives. The fan isn't hardly noticeable or beyond what you would expect for a small desk fan and you definitely need to run the fan, - it makes a difference. Without the fan the drives were hot to the touch. After running all four drives on a several hour copy job on my Mac, the drives were cool to the touch when I detached them. I got the non-raid version which was the best version. At USB 3.0 speeds files copied quicker from the finder from Mac to drive or drive to drive then using Stellar Clone Drive or another program. So, I recommend if you don't want to run the unit with the fun, you just leave the top off. If the drives are enclosed and the top on, you gotta run the fan. The unit is solid, and not flimsy, just beautiful. Like a tiny mainframe core on your desktop, - humming away softly. I didn't test the hot-swappable feature as I've learned with Mac OS that it doesn't handle dismounting from ANY multiple drive dock with out ejecting them all, - as this is an issue with the USB BUS and the OS, not the dock so I didn't even bother attempting that in the middle of a data copy. If I could give this review 20 stars, I would. It delivered beautifully on my iMac running El Capitan. The price as well.. was an EXCELLENT investment for the quality and functionality of this product, - once you start moving data around in the Terabytes you need reliability and stability in a product to protect your information that matters most.

I had been using a spacer rack to support four SATA III SSD backup drives. They were plugged into a powered USB hub. I was concerned about how warm they were. I bought the Sabrent 4 bay docking station because it had a built in fan. It works fine. However it has separate push button switches for power and fan. They are the push on push off type. I power my system from a plug strip with a master switch. It powers the PC, monitor printer-scanner, sound bar and docking station. When I turn on the system everything except the docking station comes on. I have to remember to push the buttons to turn on the docking station. Toggle or rocker switches would be more convenient. That is my only complaint about it.

Great little unit. Hold four SATA drives and ports through one USB 3.0 port. Works flawlessly. Well built, nice magnetic top. The cooling fan is helpful, and you can switch it on/off independently. I read complaints about fan noise -- I don't think its too bad at all. Just a slight white noise, almost like one of those white noise sleeping machines. About 55db. Makes me feel like a nap. Have dropped 5 different SATA HDs in there of different ages and sizes, current to 10+ years old, 240GB to 1 TB, all recognized and working flawlessly. Sometime a little tricky getting odd-thickness (too thick or thin) drives to seat, just be cognizant. Great value too. Clone drives, or group them to increase storage size. I'm storing old movie clips on them.

I don't know if I actually need the fan but I like the peace of mind it gives me as well as the form factor. I have had good luck with other Sabrent products so I expect this to last as well. Magnetic lid makes it easy to swap drives if/when necessary. My only complaint is that it has to be turned back on after a power failure but I didn't ding it for that since some people would prefer that. I had originally placed it somewhere not super-accessible but had to move it somewhere I can press the button easily.

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

I bought this unit to repurpose several SSDs from an older tower computer. It does its job well enough, but the design of the unit isn't very sturdy. It comes in rather fancy packaging - a "book wrap" printed box with a hidden magnet closure, with foam inserts. The unit is smaller than it looks in pictures, about the size of a zoom camera lens or a medium old-style thermos. It is molded in a slightly cheap-looking black plastic, particularly the top vent grille that houses the cooling fan which has ripply mold lines. It is very lightweight, which means it will easily fly off a desk if you accidentally hook the cables, which seem sturdier than the actual device. The top part which houses the fan is secured to the bottom by a single magnet along the front edge, which presumably also passes DC current to the fan as there are no other connectors. This is semi-clever until you discover, as I did, that if you pick the unit up from the top, it will come apart instantly. My unit hit a thankfully carpeted floor, but as it did the SSDs flew straight out. That brings me to the second issue: the SSD slots. They are made to accommodate 2.5" SATA III hard disks or SSDs. As these come in various thicknesses depending on the device, the slots are over-large to accommodate them, with a flimsy-feeling spring-mounted half-door that I presume is to keep dust out of it when a drive is present. The SATA data and power connector at the bottom of each slot is hard to align properly - it takes several tries to get a drive seated, and you don't want to force one in. All that said, once you have drives in, and hook it up to your computer, the drives appear in the system as they should. I did not test transfer speeds. It is important to note that this is NOT a RAID enclosure, it is 'just a bunch of disks' or JBOD. Another design quirk are the power and fan buttons, which are labelled very dark grey on black. There are no temperature sensors or variable speed controls, it's just unit on/off, fan on/off. I guess you'd need SMART monitoring software on your computer to warn you if a drive is overheating, so you can manually turn the fan on. It is not a quiet fan, either. The LEDs are bright blue (in case you want to avoid blue light for sleep purposes) and shine through the vents at the back of the case, which is... cool looking? In total: This is a somewhat unique product that solves a unique problem - if you have a bunch of SSDs or 2.5" hard drives you want to repurpose and hook up to a new computer. It seems to do that bit fairly well for the price. But I'd definitely not swap drives in and out of it too often, or try to take the unit on the road or move it too much. It will definitely look nice next to your 2013-vintage Mac Pro cylinder. If I were to make recommendations to Sabrent, I would say: • Invest in better quality plastics or make it from metal instead.. • Redesign it with a weighted base that has a non-marking, nonslip foot, maybe of a natural material like wood or cork? • Retool the SATA connectors to be more solid. • Maybe include drive caddies that slide in on rails, to ensure proper alignment? • Magnets alone cannot secure the top - maybe, like a thermos, make it like a screw cap? • Use quieter, magnetic bearing fans, at least 120mm to move more air at lower RPMs • Control the fan on/off and speed automatically with a temperature sensor • Move the power switch to the back • I'm not sure if there are individual drive activity lights, but they'd be welcome. UPDATE DEC 7 2020: One other thing you'll want to note is that the fan button is unlit, and at the top of the front panel. You might accidentally hit the power button, which *is* lit, when you're trying to turn the fan on, which will disconnect all your drives. Another thing to redesign - give it a solid physical power switch located on the back, and make the fan control lit, properly labelled / iconned, and far away from the power switch.

Easy to set up and plug in the hard drives. Working like a charm so far, but it's only been a week. So far so good.

La unidad funciona muy bien, conectada en un Mac Mini M4 reconoce los 4 discos sin ningún problema y la velocidad de transmisión de datos es también muy buena. Recomiendo la compra por el precio que tiene y la calidad.

I am using 2 of these since about 2 to 3 month and they just work fine.

Seller: Sold as used at half price. Original packaging, complete and spotless. Great bargain. Product: The 4-bay dock is used with four 8 tb Samsung QVO ssd:s and connected to USB 3.0. Read speed a satisfying 350 MB/s. No write speed data yet. When idling or reading, drive temps are under 50C with the lid taken off. Continous writing gets them up to 58C. Then the lid comes on and noisy fan activates, reducing temp to 48C. This thing is better than I expected.

Langzeittest ****4,5, Läuft seit >5Jahren im Dauerbetrieb (mit ausgemusterten HDD/SSD) zuerst mit 4x HDD seit ~2Jahren mit 4x SSD, verwende die Dock "nur" als Backup-Lösung täglich -ohne- Lüfter / Deckel, hatte in dieser Zeit genau 1x ein Problem mit einem HDD Ausfall, lag aber wohl eher am Alter der HDD ;-), der Betrieb ohne Lüfter (wg. etwas nervigem Geräusch, deshalb der halbe *Abzug ) führt zwar zu etwas höheren Temp., das hält sich aber wirklich in Grenzen und bringt keine Probleme -zumindest nicht mit 5400rpm, 2,5"HDD-, bei 7200er-HDDs könnte es natürlich anders aussehen und würde ich in diesem Gehäuse auch nicht empfehlen.

Pour la réorganisation des fichiers sur d'anciens HDD.