HF7-SU31C

I've been a loyal Mediasonic customer for years, having owned an older version of their 4-bay hard drive enclosure, which I absolutely loved. It was a workhorse, reliable, and served my storage needs perfectly. When I saw the Mediasonic USB 3.2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure DAS (HF7-SU31C) with USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C, I knew it was time for an upgrade, and I'm so glad I did! This new enclosure takes everything I appreciated about the older model and elevates it. The USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C connection is a game-changer. Data transfer speeds are incredibly fast, making backups and large file transfers feel instantaneous. I'm currently using it with 24TB HDDs, and it handles them flawlessly. Setup was a breeze, just like with my previous Mediasonic enclosure. The build quality is solid, and the design is sleek and efficient. It runs quietly, and the drives stay cool even under heavy use. If you're looking for a reliable, high-speed, and well-built external hard drive enclosure, look no further. Whether you're upgrading like me or buying your first, the Mediasonic HF7-SU31C is an outstanding choice. Highly recommend!

Good: * This unit does work on USB 3.1 and has really fantastic transfer rates. * The case is beautiful and looks very modern * The drive trays fit snugly enough where there is not any noticeable rattle or noise from the hard disks Bad: * The makers clearly told the engineers to get lost and opted to make this pretty over functional. There is a fan and an air outlet in the back, but there is NO venting at all in the front to let air in to flow over the drives. I mean, come on Mediasonic!. Radiant cooling only works when air can get in, pass over the drives, and the exit the case. That process cannot occur when there is no air inlet. * Two drives quickly overheated in this case with the fan set to "Auto". The case was in an air-conditioned room at about 75 F. The drives both reached over 110F and trigged SMART monitoring failures. * The only solution to the airflow issue is to open the front door or break it off. In fact, I have popped my door open with a CD jewel case. * With the front door open and the fan turned up manually, it does a great job of cooling the drives. Unfortunately, the front door open also makes the drives and fan noise pretty loud. In summary, it works great and does everything it promises, but only when the front door is kept open. I plan to take the door off and cut space for a screw-on fan grill and screen. Though, if I need any more of these, I will spend more and get a better designed product, such as the ORICO Aluminum 4 Bay that is not that much more. Alternatively, the older Mediasonic design is much better because it actually has air flow inlets in the front. Update: After use for a while of use, I can say it does a good job of keeping the drives cool with the door open. Most critically, the USB 3.1 controller seems stable and works well in Linux. I tested both kernels 4.9.x (Debian Stretch) and 4.16.x (Debian Buster) on an AMD X470 chipset. So, I am raising my rating to 4 stars, since it is functional, even if they screwed up by not putting a vent in the door.

I bought this to run specifically as "just a box of discs." For that purpose, it works well. Note that if you use 2.5 drives, the adapters are not included. Each drive shows up under Windows as a separate drive letter. This is perfect, as I can set up one as games, one as documents, and so on. Then I can move it to another computer and it's all ready to go. Don't use this as your only backup - it's not NAS grade backup, though I've read that people have used external solutions to use this as a RAID unit. That's not what I bought it for, it's for convenience. I have everything backed up separately on a real NAS. Like I mentioned, you have to buy the 2.5 adapters separately. They're a bit expensive, not very well made, but they do work. I have a mix of 2.5 SSD, 2.5 HDD, and 3.5 HDD and they all work fine. I'm not concerned about access speed. That's not a metric I can speak about. It's fast enough for my purposes, so not a problem. It has a master on/off button and a fan speed button. One thing I don't like - the power cable sticks out of the right hand side, and it is a 90 degree connector that sticks straight to the back (it has a fixed orientation, you can't rotate it.) That can be really annoying, or a non issue depending on where you put it. Overall I am pleased with it, and recommend it for a simple way to store and access spare disks.

This is the last mediasonic product I'll buy. I have two 2 bay enclosures that I've had for years that work great, but this 4 bay unit was complete junk. Built a software raid array and in the first week it suddenly failed and had to rebuild. Then it kept failing randomly over the next several weeks. At 4x14 tb bays, it takes a loooong time to rebuild and puts a lot of unnecessary stress on the drives. All SMART tests confirmed the drives were healthy and it was a connection issue. I contacted the warranty service. They were responsive, but instead of sending a whole new unit, they just sent the rear board in a soft mailer. The board to board connector ribbon wires that came with the replacement were heavily bent and even ripped in a spot so I would have to use the original which is annoying because it's possible it's the culprit in the connection problems I was having. Then it came with no installation instructions. The replacement (rear) board needs to connect to the front board that has the buttons and status lights. You can't remove the front plate and board and you can't remove the metal tray insert (without damaging the enclosure) so it's essentially impossible to connect due to the obstructions through the length of the enclosure. Even if I can manage to get this connected, I'm not going to subject my drives to possibly more problems. I'll follow up with my credit card company now to get this refunded. I replaced this unit with a Terramaster D4-320. It's noisier and the build quality seems poorer than this mediasonic unit, but it has worked reliably with no connection issues which is the most important part.

I purchased this unit as a DAS for my old drives Pro: cheap unit which supports both ultrastar and exos line of products, I have tested 24 TB ultrastar and 32 tb exos M drives and they load up without any issues Cons : I don’t like to be nitpicky but fans at max speed is very loud and airflow is not very good in the unit, if you are going to use this for expensive drives then make sure you are in well ventilated cool place. Direct data transfer if not used along with NAS is at very low speed

I really wanted to like this product. Recently upgraded to an iMac Pro from a tower that had plenty of internal drive slots so I needed to find a quick solution to move my internal drives. I wasn't expecting the top of the line quality but the reviews seemed encouraging and I was initially very happy. I put 3 Samsung SSDs that used to be in my other computer into the enclosure along with a new 4TB WD Black, and at first, everything worked flawlessly. I barely heard the fan noise like some people said, and the sync function seemed to work as intended, and I noticed no heat buildup. All four of my drives that I run constantly for my work worked without an issue, which was important because I had just started a big project with deadlines coming up right away. But 3 days later, after I noticed that my iMac Pro wouldn't completely shut down (happened a few times), I powered the unit down and disconnected it just to see if that was culprit. That part was ultimately inconclusive but when I went to reconnect the drive after a little while, I noticed that the power was on and it was running even though the Thunderbolt 3 cable was disconnected. And ever since, whether I connect it to the mac or not, the drive would constantly start up, lighting up the individual drive lights as if it were starting up, but then suddenly lose power completely for a few seconds, then turn back on, and just repeat. And while that was happening, the Mac would tell my the drive wasn't ejected properly (1 warning per drive), mount the drives, and then get them ejected improperly over and over. I don't want to damage the drives more, especially the 4TB spinner, but I'm afraid the damage may already be done. I may have just had bad luck with it and gotten a lemon, and I actually thought about returning it for a replacement hoping to get the performance from the first 3 days back, but as it is, I may have lost a lot of data and I've lost more time, so I can't afford to give it another chance. I'm sure this isn't the case with all of them and things do fail sometimes, but 3 days before breaking down into such unreliable and destructive performance was too much. I hope they address this in future products because drive failure and loss of data is not a small matter.

My search for a RAID enclosure for my M1 iMac started a few weeks ago and ended here. Technically this is not a HW RAID but actually works better for Mac in my view. I like it so much I bought another Mediasonic Probox with USB 3.0 (HF2-SU3S3) for my backup/Time Machine drives. Pros: 1. Fast - truly USB 3.1 gen 2 speed. With my 4 Ultrastar 7200rpm drives configured as RAID 0 by MacOS, I'm getting 500~600MB/s for writing and 700~800MB/s for reading measured by Blackmagic. This is what I had hoped since individually each would get about 230MB/s. And it's way better than 250MB/s I got from the other true HW RAID box that costed me more. Granted that box was USB 3.0 but still I had expected 500MB/s. 2. Stable. With the right MacOS RAID configuration (I use Mac OS Extended Journaled as the format and increased chunk size from default 32 to 256), it's been very stable with accumulatively >100TB transferred in the last 2 weeks. 3. Flexible. Technically this is a Mac feature and I expect all similar HDD enclosures have this benefit over HW RAID. Because each drive shows up on Mac individually, all pre-configured RAIDs work without change. No reformatting required. In future when more storage and speed are needed, you can simply add another box. 4. Good looks and instructions. The package actually looks a real product unlike some other RAID boxes I saw. Could be improved: 1. Heat dissipation like many have mentioned especially with door closed. However I don't consider it a con and am keeping my 5-star review because 1) it’s still way better than what I had before or the other HW RAID box, 2) the box offers various settings that would work in most, if not all, situations, and 3) I made a small modification that alleviated this issue somewhat (more below). First about my setup. I keep hard drives in a closed cabinet for both maintaining a clean iMac look and keeping the noise down. Needless to say, heat dissipation is especially important to me. The cabinet has air circulation fans and I used to place the external hard drives on a 3-fan laptop cooling pad but honestly didn’t think that was adequate. Those hard drives had no fans and were reliant on passive cooling. The g-drives were often hot to the touch. This time I decided to actually figure out how hot they get. For lack of a temperature monitoring utility on Mac I used a Braun ThermoScan that seems to give accurate readings except it caps at 108F. Here is what I found: 1. With door closed, the temperature does rise quickly. With door open it works significantly better albeit the noise level goes up. Since I have it in a cabinet and noise is not issue, I'm keeping the door open. 2. The Auto Fan setting seems to work as expected. According to the spec, level 1 is <45C, level 2 is 45~55C and level 3 is >55C. In my testing it goes to level 2 when it's slightly above 108F (43C). I’ve never seen it go to level 3 even with door closed though. If I can trust the spec that tells me it’s been able to maintain below 55C. According to Ultrastar data sheet, the operation temperature for the drive is 5~60C so that seems okay. 3. If you want to be more conservative and don't mind the noise, I find setting fan to manual level 3, I can keep the temperature below 108F even after hours of copying TBs of data. Or you can set to level 2 and it'd go beyond 108F only in extreme conditions. 4. The bottom drive was about 3F higher than the top, and I think it's because the fan is mounted high and the air tends to flow up. This is where I think it could be improved - I drilled holes on the bottom of the box and that improved the circulation quite a bit. The shell is made of metal but the bottom is conveniently of plastic. I'm sure this voided my warranty but is worth it. With this modification you can have the door closed to keep the noise down. 5. It has a power sync feature that would shut down if Mac puts the drives to sleep. That's currently my default setting and it works very well. All in all I'm very happy with this (and the USB 3.0 model as well). I'll buy another one if I run out of space again, or upgrade to 8-bay USB 3.1 gen 2 model if they have one.

I have my media on a server, and was looking for a relatively inexpensive backup. I use linux (Ubuntu 22.04.2) with a robust system: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x 12 core CPU with 64GB DD4 memory on a 1TB Samsung SSD. The unit holds 4 8TB HGST drives. I didn't realize the unit had a USB-C connecter but on inspecting my motherboard, it had a USB-C input! Who knew? I have about 17TB of data to transfer from my server which runs TrueNAS. I set mine up as a ZFS RAIDZ1 which is like RAID5. Ubuntu Recognized the device and drives and the RAID set up easily. I used Chat GPT to help me import the zfs drive into my home folder and created the dataset. I use Rslsync to sync data between my machines. A little tricky for setting the dataset permissions but again Chat GPT to the rescue. Rslsync shows about 100mbps transfer speed, but the drives (all of them) began showing 'Too many errors, resilvering.' The odds that all 4 drives have read/write errors and failed is statistically unlikely. I think this is a Hardware issue, but it is above my pay-grade. It also shut itself down a couple of times, requiring system reboot. I slowed the data transfer to 1 folder at a time which it seemed to handle better. I did not check my motherboard Bios before I started this process to see if it had an update, otherwise, I have no idea what is going on here. Once up and running, it has been fine, and handles small data sets that I add to my system. I think the 17TB transfer was too much on it. Can't say from my experience that I can recommend it

I got this to declutter the shelf where my home media server lives. Instead of having 4 USB drives sitting on the shelf I now have this one box connected via USB-C to a mini-PC with no internal storage beyond an NVMe SSD. It's very quick and works perfectly well but does NOT support hardware RAID. One could make a software RAID using Windows 10/11 Professional, note that the specs state this enclosure does not work with Linux. I have not tested it with Linux. The sync button is interesting. With sync turned on the enclosure powers up and down with the computer to which it is attached but will not recover from a power failure, that requires a human intervention to push the power button on the front. I cannot really fault this enclosure, for the price it is a great deal.

Good for the price...I suppose

Very easy to install, works well and reliable as well as very quiet

Only had it 2 days but so far very good! I bought this to replace an Orico 5 bay box which had several faults and was returned for refund and that was actually bought to replace my QNAP 4 bay NAS which has failed after 4 years. Decided I did not really need a NAS as only used it for backups and local storage not as a server. This one seems to work as it should and has the added advantage of the "sync" function to turn on and off with your PC which seems to work OK and I like the provision of being able to control the fan speeds - either auto or manually - which I have tested and with reasonably heavy use I have found that speed 2 seems to keep the drives under 45C and is virtually silent - speed 3 will lower the temps quite a bit but is audible - not a nasty noise so quite usable unless the box is right next to you. Disk installation is not tool-less as you have to fit plastic handles to one end of each disk and then clip a metal retaining plate over all the bays which lightly clamps against the rubber buffers on the handles - seemed a bit of a fuss but it definitely keeps the drives securely in place and is easy once you have fitted it a couple of times. The only slight annoyance is you cannot "safely remove" all the drives in one go like I could on the Orico? Each is listed as a USB 3.1 SATA bridge and "safely removed" individually in my Win 10? It also does not seem to spin down any of the drives whilst it is connected to the PC? Main concern - it only came with a US style mains lead! For the moment I have used the one from my redundant QNAP NAS for now but come on Amazon - I know it came from Amazon US via an Amazon UK order so why is it not supplied with the correct mains lead for the destination market? Many well known suppliers in China and Singapore can get it right! Update: I have been through a very involved and time consuming process of trying to get Amazon to send me a complimentary UK mains lead so I can keep the product and make it actually conform to the market they have sold it in. After all it's basically only a fiver or so! "Chat" was useless so got them to telephone me - not able to replace parts only the whole item or a refund! When I explained I was already returning the Orico as faulty and this Mediasonic actually works but it was sold with the wrong mains lead - surely it would be far more cost effective for Amazon just to send me a suitable mains lead, FOC, rather than having the cost of the return carriage and them sorting and putting it in their "used but no cables" type warehouse deals? Obviously a replacement would have the same problem! I was told they would "escalate" to a higher level and if I would like to add a suitable lead to my basket they would sort it out. I added the cable to my basket - it is still sitting there. The result I got several confusing help emails from CS throughout the evening plus an SMS then a phone call just before midnight! The caller had a very heavy non English accent and talked so fast I could barely understand anything - he sent me a code which I read back and then he wanted another confirmation to another email - at this point I started to be suspicious so I ended the call. Very disappointing and just confirms that like many others, Amazon has joined the ranks of not really caring about their customers or any problems that their mistakes have caused. We have your money, don't bother us, return it if their is a problem seems to be their answer to everything! "Customer centric" - hardly!

Like others, I removed the front case for better air flow. A star is taken off for the super flimsy front cover. But the enclosure works flawlessly so far, no disconnecting with my pc at all. Great speeds. Update on 30/1/2021, after 4 months of use. Enclosure has failed. Bays 2/3 stopped working, leaving 1 and 4. 4 slowly went away as well. Gave me the impression that my drives were failing