CONCLUSION

   TerraMaster may have been around for the better part of two decades but it’s not really a well-known manufacturer in the market so when we got the D5-300 we honestly didn’t know what to expect. Sure building a good enclosure is not rocket-science but trust me when I say that there are quite a few manufacturers out there that have failed to impress us with their offerings. With that out of the way as you can all see performance is very good and in almost all of our tests we even managed to surpass the 210MB/s read and 190MB/s write advertised by TerraMaster (we surpassed 260MB/s in ATTO). USB 3.0 can go even higher and it should with 5 Constellation ES.3 4TB drives in RAID0 but even so the D5-300 is currently the fastest enclosure in our charts (to be fair however it’s also the only 5 bay one). Unlike many multi-bay enclosures in the market the D5-300 is also silent thanks to the two 80mm exhaust fans TerraMaster has used so you don’t have to worry about noise levels. Unfortunately we don’t like the drive trays used not only because they are made out of plastic but also because they require screws for the drives (some enclosures currently available use tool-less systems for the drives). I also would like to see an LCD screen and buttons on the enclosure for configuring RAID instead of just the software suite so I hope TerraMaster takes this into consideration with upcoming models.

   Multi-bay external HDD enclosures are considered special peripherals and as such they are not aimed at casual consumers on a very tight budget. To be more precise the D5-300 by TerraMaster currently retails for USD249.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 233Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) a price tag which is set quite a bit upwards than what for example SilverStone asks for their 4 bay TS432U model (still it's reasonable for a 5 bay model). At the end of the day however you can use the aluminum D5-300 to store up to 50TB of data with very fast read & write speeds and that’s more than enough for it to get our Golden Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Excellent Performance (Up To 260MB/s)
- 5x3.5”/2.5" Drive Bays
- USB 3.0 Type-C Connectivity
- LARGE & RAID 0/5/10 Modes
- Dual 80mm Silent Exhaust Fans
- Control Software

CONS

- Plastic HDD Trays
- No JBOD Mode
- Only USB 3.0 Connectivity