Enclosure review - DatOptic sBOX-eSUJ
#1
Basic Features:
5 SATAII drive bays (compatible with any 3.5” SATA drive)
Trayless - just slide in the bare drive and close the door
eSATA “and USB3” host connections (see below)
JBOD (just a bunch of disks) - no hardware RAID

My Setup:
Attached to a Mac mini through included eSATA/USB3 adapter
Sometimes accessing the drives on local network through the Mac mini
WD Green SATAIII 3.0TB drives (4)

Note: because of the 6-image limit, I added three more images in a later post

The first impression on unboxing this machine is that it seems very solid and well-built with good components. The case is heavy aluminum and everything looks nice. It seems like a machine made by an engineer, without a lot of original parts and without the costs being completely squeezed down in the manufacturing process.

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A small example of the high-quality is the feet, with rubbery bottoms that absorb vibration.
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The second impression is - wait a minute - there is no USB port! There is only eSATA, and they provide a short eSATA cable and a USB3 adapter to plug into the USB port on the computer. This was a big surprise, as they advertised USB3 and eSATA connections. That is deceptive in my opinion. Now I know why they don’t post detailed pictures of the machine.

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After swallowing hard, I learned to like this thing in many respects. The drive bays seem very high quality and well designed. You slide the bare drive in. When you feel it contact the mechanism in the back, you just close the door and the drive goes in the rest of the way and makes solid connections. Then you can lock the door with one of the (6!!) provided keys to avoid accidentally opening it. When you open the door, the drive kind of springs out, you don’t have to tug on it to get it unplugged. As a bonus, the bays have nice lights, a blue one to indicate a drive is there and has power; and a red one that flashes with drive activity.

There are also greenish LEDs along the bottom of the front. Five of them (one for each bay) are redundant, as they merely light when a drive is present and flash with activity. I imagine they are vestiges of a previous design, when the bays had trays and didn’t have their own lights. Then there is a power-on light (identical to the others, and in the same row, which makes it a bit hard to see what is going on). Finally there are two “bays” for lights on each end of the light row. They don’t appear to have LEDs in them. I can only imagine DatOptic couldn’t find a light bar with 6 positions, so they used one that has 10 positions.

For reasons known only to DatOptic, 6 keys are provided, 2 each in 3 little bags. Along with each pair of keys are 4 little screws, for a total of 12. I’m guessing they are also vestigial from the time when the box had trays and you needed screws to attach the handles or something.

DatOptic is definitely minimalist when it comes to documentation. There is a one-sided sheet that comes with it. It is for a different model number (sBOXP-TL) and has very little information. It doesn’t show a USB adapter or mention using it, so I guess this was the model number before they decided to say it had USB3 connectivity.

I simply inserted and formatted the drives and it began working fine. I don’t have a way of clocking the speeds, and speed isn’t a priority to me, but it is faster than my old Drobo Gen. 2. Copying from drive to drive within the enclosure seems to copy 1 GB in about 12 seconds.

This thing is designed to handle much hotter drives than WD Green, and handle them working hard. There are two fans on the back and there appear to be two slim fans beneath each bay. I don’t know quite what the airflow pattern is supposed to be, but that’s a lot of cooling. It’s something they call DirectAir. Unfortunately the fans run at low speed all the time while the enclosure is powered on, even if the computer is off and the drives are presumably spun down if not powered off (in this state, the blue bay lights are on but the greenish lights in the lower row are off). The fans seem to speed up automatically if the temperature rises, but that has been rare for me and I’m sure I have never seen their top speed.

The fans are quiet at low speed anyway, only slightly louder than the cooling fan on my television, and from 12 feet away I can barely hear it in a quiet room. Watching movies from the enclosure I don’t notice it at all. I just wish the fans would stop completely when all the drives are cool and spun down.

I can’t really tell what is going on with the drives spinning down or not. I have the computer set to allow drives to spin down when possible. These drives are so quiet, I can just barely hear them spin up through the fan sound with my ear right in front of the bays. They seem to spin up sequentially. The bay activity lights will be on (not flashing), for each drive for 3-5 seconds in sequence. Sometimes it seems to cycle through all the drives in this way several times.

The unit seems long, I'm not sure what is taking up the space in the back. Of course the fans, a circuit board, and I guess it has a big power supply.

Problem
Let me say at the outset that I don’t blame DatOptic for this. It seems to be an OS X issue that has been around for years. But one would think that a manufacturer of enclusures that somewhat caters to mac users would at least be aware and understand the problem. I contacted them and got little useful help until they didn't answer my email.

The problem is that, at random times, even without any user input to the computer, the system will come to a complete stop.  The bay activity lights will light up solid for 3-5 seconds in sequence, then it will go back through them again, sometimes 4 or 5 times.  I can very faintly hear drives spin up during this process, presumably the drives other than the one I’ve been writing to. Sometimes the pauses lasts 10-15 seconds, sometimes a minute or so.  Then the system resumes.

This might happen a few times in an hour (for example when watching a show from one of the drives) or much more often.  It doesn't matter which drive is being used or which computer it is connected to. Here is an example from Activity Monitor.  The graph shows 5 minutes of activity while backing up to one of the drives, and you can see it stopped three times during the 5-minute period.
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I'll make a long story short. The OS frequently queries attached drives, even when they are asleep, and often when there seems to be no logical reason. Even 3rd party apps that have no business looking in the drives will access them. When you learn about these processes, you can take steps to stop some of the primary offenders. But there are others that there seems no way to prevent.

Conclusion
If you want a 4-5 bay enclosure, and you don't care about RAID, this is a high-quality one at a decent price. They should certainly advertise it more forthrightly as not having a USB port, but it does seem well built. I'll try to post some photos later.
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#2
some pictures would be really appreciated ...
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#3
I have two 4 bay Mediasonic enclosures and one of them drops the network mounts like once a month...it's frustrating enough that I've been looking into a solution. This is an interesting option...not sure I like that eSata to USB3 thing, but I'll look into this.
Thanks for the review. Looking forward to pics of it setup.
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#4
I updated the review and added some pics, but ran into a 6-pic limit. So here are the rest.

Inside each bay you can see the fans that cool each drive.
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Looks like you can switch it to 220 volts.
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It's a bit on the long side.
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LibreELEC 10.0.4 * ViMediaManager or TinyMediaManager | Raspberry pi 4b
Sharing media from NAS via NFS (optical out to receiver, HDMI to TV) | TV remote with CEC / Bluetooth keyboard
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#5
Good lord it is long...
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#6
You mean my review or the enclosure? Wink

Yes, but there's an over-rated power supply in there too, not an external brick.

It is long, but the photo may exaggerate the length. I didn't measure it but DatOptic says it is
30.5cm x 19.0 cm x 41.9cm (12" x 7.5" x 16.5") (H X W X D).
"D" is the length.
LibreELEC 10.0.4 * ViMediaManager or TinyMediaManager | Raspberry pi 4b
Sharing media from NAS via NFS (optical out to receiver, HDMI to TV) | TV remote with CEC / Bluetooth keyboard
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#7
Ah gotcha ok, was wondering why Smile
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#8
Really large enclosure...

Thank you for the great review Smile
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Enclosure review - DatOptic sBOX-eSUJ0