8 bay 6G Hot Swap Trayless SAS/SATA JBOD Tower Enclosure - J0806T

From the very beginning when I received this product it didn't work properly. I went through a series of troubleshooting with the seller and couldn't resolve the problem. I really wanted this to work, but it was defective. Seller agreed to take the unit back and give me a full refund so I shipped it back at my own expense of over $100 and I haven't received a dime back in refund. Although the seller did try to work with me, communication was exceptionally poor. Sometimes would go weeks without a response to my messages. I shipped it back on 3/1/24 and it is now 5/9/24 and I haven't heard a word from the seller despite several messages. Stay away from this seller.

First SAS build using 4TB Seagate Ironwolves, connected it with an LSI SAS9207-8E HBA and two Monoprice miniSAS cables. The drives are formatted with ZFS in RAIDz1 configuration.The enclosure is well built. The drive doors are sturdy, lock securely and airflow through the case is more than adequate. It was very easy to install the drives, and they fit very snugly in their slots. I noticed the backplane is made by iStarUSA.I am floored with how easy this was to install. On first boot, the HBA took about 30 seconds to initialize and scan the disks - it recognized them all without any tinkering or configuration. Once I rebuilt the kernel (Gentoo) for SCSI/SAS support, all the drives were exposed at /dev/sdX. The array is pushing 100-120 MB/s write speeds consistently. This is all on a budget Ryzen 5 2600 build.The array has been online for less than a week, and no complaints or rebuilds so far from ZFS as I have been migrating data. I will update this review with any problems I may experience as time goes on.

About the design, it bugs me they made this enclosure so large. Seems like a lot of empty space inside for just eight drives. There are sexier more expensive enclosures. It arrived with one internal fan not working, but the seller sent a replacement quickly. Each of the two bays has a fan and then there's a case fan at the back. Cooling seems effective, my 4TB HGST and Seagate drives run around 32-35C. The caddyless design is convenient. I'm using an LSI SAS9207-8E on Ubuntu connected to this enclosure by SF-8088 cables.

Nothing to dislike. It is a good size, holds 8 drives so it is perfect to pair with an 8 port SAS controller. It looks nice and feels/looks solid. I plugged in SAS cables from file server to this unit and all drives showed up immediately.