MobileRAID MR8UT6G New Generation 8-Bay 3.5" inch SATA to USB 3.0 / eSATA Hardware RAID (00/50) / Spanning​ / JBOD

The documentation for this tower may as well be nonexistent. Tell you all the things that can do but doesn’t get into any kind of detail. I’m not a raid expert not even close but I do have a brain and I am very computer literate. I understand what rate is supposed to do and I’ve used it; Just not hardware raid. I followed the instructions and tried and tried and tried with zero success. I emailed the tech-support and two days later nothing. I will adjust the stars in the future if necessary. At this point I’m leaning more toward returning it and getting a simple tower without raid. Every hard drive that I add to this shows up and windows as a separate drive. I already have that but wanted to get away from windows storage spaces. This was supposed to be my solution to that.So, unless you are familiar with “Hardware”; RAID you might be better off looking for a simple USB tower.

The MR8UT6G unit trays differ from advertised picture. The advertised picture falsely represent the real trays shipped with the unit as you can see in picture attached side-by-side with explanation. The advertised picture (left) seems to indicate that the pieces A and B are removable. But received picture (right) have no such pieces and the plastic projections to hold disk are permanently fixed to the base. Therefore some manufacturers disk models are not mountable (example: Toshiba N300 8TB), while other disks like Western Digitial (8TB) mounts fine. The problem is also mentioned in another review. Consequence is that disks are not usable at all with this unit. I am yet to speak with Sans Digital tech support. I may change my star rating if there is a solution from the manufacturer.EDITED:Sans Digital staff recommended me to clip of the plastic projections in the tray using a nail clipper or package knife. It took me less than 5 minutes to clip all projections from all trays. Then I connected the unit to Dell 7060 mini tower with Ubuntu 22.04 via the USB cable (USB B-type to A-type) from unit. All disks were instantly seen. The unit's firmware (JMicron) only supported USB drivers. UAS was not supported. Since I use mdadm (software RAID) in RAID6, the array check speed was only 23 MB/s, perhaps due to USB driver in Ubuntu 22.04. Replaced USB cable with Type C end, and that did not make any difference. Unit is stable without driver disconnects. mdadm raid checks takes a while (at 23 MB/s) but completes fine. The previous unit from another vendor did ~120 MB/s with UAS drivers, but it had frequent driver disconnects, mdadm raid check never got completed, and the array was at risk of losing data.Overall I increased the star rating from 1 to 4, but not happy with the unit's lack of UAS protocol support.

Bought one of this. The disk trays in this unit do not compatible with my 3.5" hard drives that I pulled from a few external hard drive enclosures, this kind hard drive has only mounting holes at each corner, not like the the internal hard drives for PC that have middle mounting holes. The standard PC internal hard drive should work in this unit.