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Speaking of the fan, in a quiet room, the fan noise is audible. But I don’t consider it as loud or obnoxious. Some people may consider this as “noisy”, especially if they are used to very silent conditions. However, in my years of using a PC and testing several components with fans, like graphics cards or CPU coolers, the DF4RU3 isn’t the loudest I heard. Picatoste if you you only have one pool, using the /dev/sdx probably won’t be a problem itself, as the drives could all be mixed up, (zfs would just deal with it) unless a USB boot drive is listed as a /dev/sdx device (sd cards list as /dev/mmcblk, rather than /dev/sdx)
Each tray is made of a combination of metal and plastic. The frame itself is solid metal, whereas the sides and the front portion is plastic. The pull tab is plastic covered with perforated metal. I guess this is to give the pull tab more rigidity. However, the joints of the pull tab and the whole mechanism (except for the spring) are plastic. So, it’s best not to yank the tray with excessive force.The unit that I got didn’t come with the latest firmware. And I was informed that it is recommended that I upgrade to the latest firmware since it includes some fix. On the flip side, aside from storing your non-active game folders, the DF4RU3 is a great solution for storing your gameplay recordings, and other large file-sized media. So, for gaming-specific use, I wouldn’t use this. But for media storage, yes, this is definitely a useful storage solution.
However, I would not use any hard drive or external hard drive enclosure for gaming, especially if they are limited in speed. That would only increase loading time and some elements, effects, or texture may not load instantly with a slow hard disk drive.Above, you can see the front and front-side view of the DF4RU3. It looks stylish and has a nice aesthetic. The design reminds me of Apple’s Power Mac G5 desktop PC. It is mostly metal on the outside making it very sturdy and robust. Whereas, its sides are covered with a clear acrylic side panel. AJA System test is mostly a sequential test and as you can see from the results above, I got similar results to the ATTO disk benchmark. The 870 QVO SSD performs best when connected directly to the PC’s motherboard. But both the WD Red and WD Red Pro hard drives perform similarly, regardless if connected directly to the motherboard or via the DF4RU3. CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Results
With this enclosure the output of the command ls /dev/disks/by-id corresponded to “serial number of the case.DISK1” and commands like udevadm could only see the data of the enclosure instead of the data of the drives.
The drive bays are numbered, with the top bay being the first one. There are no LED indicators or any buttons on the front portion. Only the drive bays can be seen at the front. According to Yottamaster, this is their first attempt to include an RGB fan in their product. Due to the limitations of the PCB design, they can not add additional features or controls for the RGB fan. The fan is just for aesthetics since they are marketing this external enclosure to gamers, streamers, and content creators. There is also a non-RAID version, the DF4U3; and if you need a 5-bay solution Yottmaster has the DF5RU3 and DF5U3 as well. If you are looking for a much faster solution or a DAS that uses a USB Type-C (10Gbps) and can be daisy-chained, Yottmaster has the FS5C3 and FS4C3. I’ve made a DIY NAS with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a couple of external USB 3.5" drives. I am planning on adding more drives but I am fearing the mess of cables that comes with that. To avoid it, I bought an external enclosure with 5 bays (Orico 9558u3) but I had to return it since, when trying to import the pool, it didn’t recognize the drives of the pool for their /dev/disks/by-id but rather for sdx.
For me, I would prefer to use a DAS, rather than a NAS. It’s easier to use, just like any other external (portable) storage drive. And it’s plug and play, no need to do some network configuration or anything like that. But your mileage may vary and it primarily depends on your situation or use case. I’m looking forward to seeing Yottamaster release a much faster version of this. Perhaps an external enclosure with a Thunderbolt interface or an enclosure with dedicated SSD drive bays. Games nowadays are getting more and more demanding, with larger file sizes, and require a much faster read/write speed. Also notice that there is a bit of performance drop. Just a tiny bit, by a few megabytes per second. I doubt that it will be noticeable at all in real-world use. Okay, time to wrap up this review. Pricing and Availability Since the DF4RU3 has a USB 3.0 interface and is limited to 5Gbps of theoretical speed; I have more or less a rough idea of how this external enclosure will perform. I tested the DF4RU3 with a WD Red 12TB HDD and a WD Red PRO 14TB HDD. Also, I tested it with a Samsung 870 QVO SSD to see how much performance are we going to lose if we use a much faster drive.Connect the "HUB" port of the enclosure (device 1) to the "Main" port of the enclosure (device2) with the C to C data cable.
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