I'm on the lookout for an external 4-bay+ 3.5'' Sata enclosure with a 3.1 USB connector. The cheapest I have found are Orico branded, on Amazon and others, but I suspect these will have their own power management system which will make all the drives spin down when not in use (and then have to spin them all up when they are) - I'm looking for an enclosure only for a bunch of disks (JBOD) that can be managed by the system it is being plugged into.
Anything out there?
You're not going to power 4x 3.5 drives via a single USB
Not with that attitude you wont
So basically you want an enclosure that is really just a USB hub connected to SATA adapters?
Only USB 3.0 but I think highly of the ICY BOX 10-Bay.
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01GPXNLC4
And $600~ is an okay price for this JBoD.
USB 3.0 is still 625 MegaBytes per second shared across 10 drives and no one drive seems to ever hog all the bandwidth when other drives are under load too. I have not thoroughly benchmarked it, though if I set half a dozen files hashing asynchronously, one file per drive, it seems to align with the optimum; if Process Explorer’s I/O Delta Read Bytes column should be tallied in this way.
I have 3 units stacked on their side. Inserting drives in this orientation, half of them will not mate with the backplane, this is because the unit is meant to stand vertically where gravity lines up the connectors perfectly - you can use a ruler to brace if horizontal is preferable. (If running HDDs in one orientation, do not change orientation at a later date, for it is a slightly different calibration of the heads to the spinning surface.)
The best darn 3 metre data cable to use with it, here:
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00C7RZPJ0
I do a lot of checksumming and not a single instance of data corruption seen was ever caused by the unit or cable.
I love that each bay can be safely removed by Windows and the light goes out on the respective bay upon success (when no locked files, etc). Safely Remove all and the chassis fan goes silent, turns off. Neat. Hotplugging supported, depressing individual power buttons first, of course. And they're all USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Devices. Great.
Vantec was my choice for a long time, but they left the australian market. I stay far away from orico.
I would probably go for Terramaster if you are just going to use it for jbod.
Something like an IcyCube? https://www.icydock.com/goods_cat.php?id=129
Terramaster do a few budget ones too. https://www.terra-master.com/global/products/d4-320.html
You're not going to power 4x 3.5 drives via a single USB. They're going to need a power supply.