INTRODUCTION

    Weather you have a very large digital media collection or you just need lots of storage space for your work and/or backups then pairing your hard drives with a multi-bay external hard drive enclosure is always the easiest and most affordable way out since they combine high storage capacity with extremely fast read and write speeds. Luckily although in the past not many manufacturers saw fit to have multi-bay models with space for more than just two drives as part of their product lines lately that has changed since more and more seem to favor them. Much like with everything else in the electronics market you can get more bays as you go higher in price and since currently 4/5 bay external drive enclosures seem to be more popular among consumers we decided to gather and test some such models the first of which is the latest D5-300 USB 3.0 External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure by TerraMaster.

   TerraMaster is a professional brand which focuses on storage products, including network attached storage and direct attached storage, which is sold in more than 40 countries and regions. Products of TerraMaster are mainly designed for customers such as small and medium businesses and home users. With its core competitiveness in excellent hardware design and strong software developing ability, TerraMaster aims to provide customers with excellent products that offer reliability and value. TerraMaster has focused on the development of storage technology for 16 years. TerraMaster continues to explore storage technology and applications, such as how to create more functionality and value to storage products and make storage application easier, more convenient, safer and faster to provide customers with a complete, reliable and trusted data storage solution.

   The D5-300 may not be the only 5-bay USB 3.0 external drive enclosure available in the market today (supports both 3.5" and 2.5" drives) but it's certainly one of the very few (if not the only one) that uses a type-C connector and supports RAID 0/5 and large modes for the drives used. TerraMaster claims that by using USB 3.0 the device has a maximum read performance of 210MB/s and a write performance of 190MB/s and so although we've seen better there's no denying that it's a very fast enclosure. For good or bad TerraMaster has equipped the D5-300 only with USB 3.0 so although we can understand that going for the most popular type was expected that means people who may want an enclosure with multiple connections (like eSATA and or Thunderbolt 3) will have to look elsewhere. To keep the temperature of the drives inside in check Terra Master has used aluminum for the enclosure and has outfitted it with two 80mm rear exhaust fans. Time to dig a little bit deeper and see what the D5-300 USB 3.0 External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure is all about.