QNAP TR-004U 1U 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure Direct Attached Storage (Das) with Hardware RAID USB 3.0 Type-C

Good rack mounted DAS solution that I came across for my homelab setup (M1 Mac mini, Plex + Time Machine + File Storage). Fit nicely in my rack and was able to get it setup in about an hour. One small glitch I hit was that the Raid Manager software didn't recognize the DAS until I installed my HDDs into the unit. I am using 2x Seagate X20 18 TB HDDs in a RAID 1 configuration, and 2x 5 TB WD in another RAID 1 configuration. Am able to get sustained Reads of ~225 MBs and Writes of about ~240 MBs (tested using Black Magic Disk Speed Test). I tried switching the unit to RAID 0 for the 18 TB drives, but didn't see any performance improvement (which for my homelab is fine). The Software configured RAID is nice since I don't have to fool around with DIP switches. And the SMART status for each drive is displayed nicely in the RAID Manager Software (although I can't seem to find a way to have it email / push notification for a failed SMART indicator on a drive). One caveat, this unit (and the TR-004 non rack mount) is limited to SATA II (although compatible with SATA III drives). For my spinning HDDs this wasn't an issue, but could bottleneck for SSDs. I will note the TR-002 (2 bay non rack mount variant) can run at full SATA III speeds which is odd. Confirmed this with QNAP tech support. Overall I recommend, but dropped 1 star for the SATA II limitation. ---- Update ----- After using this for a few days, I ran some more speed tests on the device and have to say I'm pretty disappointed. I tested with an SSD in one of the bays and my 2x 18 TBs in the others. I turned off all raid modes and just accessed the disks directly, and was shocked at how poor the r/w speeds were. When running the Black Magic Disk speed tester, I started testing 1 of the hard drives to get a baseline performance (around ~225 MB/s read speed) and tested writing to the other HDD by copying a large file (just used macOS to generate a large random file of text ~ 10 GB in size). As soon as I started copying the file, the read speed tanked down to ~25-30 MB/s! Writing speeds were about the same (tried both copying to/from the drive and 25-30 is the most I could get while both black magic and the copy operation were running concurrently). Just to be sure this wasn't the HDDs, I popped an SSD I had into the unit to test with (again no RAID mode, just direct disk access). The SSD had slightly better performance, maybe around ~50 MB/s (while copying files to one of the HDDs), so that led me to believe it might be a limitation of the backplane in the unit. Just for kicks, I took 1 HDD and the SSD and put it into another 2 bay USB-C caddy I had lying around. With the same Black Magic software, the HDD was able to sustain Read / Write speeds of ~300 MB/s, and when copying files to the SSD only dropped down to about ~260 MB/s (the SSD speeds were closer to ~500 MB/s). So I am concluding it has something to do with this device and returning / no longer able to recommending the unit. Updating to 1 star.

I loaded drives, plugged it into USB-c, configured via MS Widows Storage Pool and it worked perfectly. I will try it as an expansion on a QNAP NAS shortly.

I have not run into any problems like other reviewers have. Works great

This device is clearly not ready to be out in the public. The setup was pretty straight forward but it seems there may be a complication with QTS 4.4.1 or with the unit itself as it constantly fails my RAID 5 and won't actually tell me why besides "multiple disk have failed" which I've determined to be completely bogus. I've tested over 10 NAS (RED & Ironwolf) drives with this unit that work in both my TVS-872XT and 453Be but fail in the TR-004u randomly. QNAP support has been absolutely great trying to help me solve the issue but I've decided to return it. It's been too much trouble off the jump.

Disclaimer - for many users of RAID your #1 priority is data safety and recoverability. My review does not address these critical points but instead focuses on my disbelief, confusion and finally shock at the speed available from the device. On initial setup I populated the array with 3 8tb WD Red nas drives that had been running in a QNAP Ts 4 bay model. Install was easy enough and I initially striped the drives at RAID 0 to get a baseline. Now these drives are built for durability, not speed and are SATA 3 5400rpm with very little cache. However I was expecting to see speeds in the 100mb/sec range at least over a USB 3.0 connection to my MBP. I regularly see speeds of 80mb/sec+ transferring files _OVER WIFI_ to the QNAP nas with the same drives. When I started testing locally (giving the drives plenty of time to stripe and synch up) I could not push past 40mb/sec on either write OR read. TBH I thought I had made a mistake somewhere. So I reset everything, set the test up again and ... 40mb/sec. So I tried some other RAID modes. Same speed. Not breaking 40mb/sec. My last thought that night was "guess my drives are bunk. Time for new ones!" and ordered 4 Seagate EXOS Enterprise drives. These are _fast_ drives at 7200rpm and 256mb of cache. They're hot and noisy and generally overkill for a homelab setup, but whatever. These drives arrive and I set them up - and still can't break 40mb/sec on either write OR read! Just for fun I moved the old drives back into the QNAP Ts, set it for RAID 5 and started moving 6tb of data over the network. With the same drives that wouldn't break 40mb/sec in this QNAP DAS device were easily doing 80mb/sec+ in the QNAP Ts. I'm returning this and going with another OWC Mercury Rack Pro which easily writes 200mb/sec in RAID 10 and a respectable 160mb/sec+ writes in RAID 5.