Review: Acasis 4-bay 3.5-inch USB 3 hard drive enclosure (EC1003)

Review unit provided by Acasis

The Acasis EC1003 is a 4-bay 3.5-inch hard drive enclosure selling at USD 229. This is a Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) designed to provide plenty of external storage.

Specifications

Things included

• Storage enclosure
• Screw driver
• Screws
• USB-C to USB-A/C cable
• User guide
• Power cable
• 96W power adapter

Design

This is a big hard drive enclosure that will take up much space on the table. Build quality is excellent with the aluminium alloy body. Only the front is plastic.

The metal fins at the top do a good job with heat dissipation. To install the hard drives, just push the right button and a handle will pop out. There are no locks for the trays.

The plastic hard drive holder can be pulled out easily, and there's a sticker on it that shows installation instructions.

The hard drive holder supports 2.5 and 3.5-inch drives. There are two flaps by the side which has to be opened first before a 3.5-inch hard drive can fit. Close the two flaps and the hard drive will be locked into place. You can use screws to secure the bottom but that's not necessary.

Inside the enclosure is one 80 x 80mm fan which unfortunately produces audible fan noise. Fan noise is not as loud as a gaming laptop but it's definitely loud enough to be heard easily. If you record videos or podcasts indoors, the fan noise is the instant deal breaker here.

The power button is located lower down, and beside is the USB 3 (5Gbps) USB-C port and power port.

No driver or software installation is needed. Once you format your hard drives, they will come on individually. It's a plug and play system. If you want to use this enclosure as cloud storage, you'll have to install cloud software yourself.

Transfer speed

One of the main limitations of this hard drive enclosure is speed.

Typical 7200RPM hard drives have transfer speed around 120MB/s to 200MB/s, and that is not fast enough for 4K 60FPS video editing.

If you install 2.5-inch SSDs, sure you'll get faster transfer speed, but less storage capacity, but the maximum speed will still be restricted by USB 3, and in this case it's 5Gbps or 625MB/s.

The use case for the Acasis EC1003 in my opinion is just for backup purposes. If you want faster storage for operation, nowadays you just go with SSDs. The reason to go with spinning drives is for storage capacity.

The transfer speed I recorded for a single drive for write is 142MB/s (usually lower) and for read is 170MB/s. Those are the typical speeds you can expect with spinning drives. This speed is not fast enough for 4K 60FPS video editing.

I've configured a RAID0 with my Macbook Pro and was able to record higher transfer speeds. RAID0 has 350MB/s for write and 369MB/s for read and this is quite consistent. This is fast enough for 4K 60FPS video editing.

Anyway for video editing, I recommend using SSD instead which is obviously faster. The Acasis enclosure can then be used for backing up the video files.

Do note that if you keep all your backups in the Acasis enclosure, there's the risk of a single backup in a single location.

To conclude, the Acasis EC1003 looks good and works as advertised. The main selling point here is huge storage capacity, and main limitation is transfer speed. Downside would be the fan noise.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Beautiful design
+ Excellent build quality
+ Does not generate much heat
+ Huge storage capacity possible
+ Supports 2.5 and 3.5-inch hard drives
+ Plug and play
- Fan noise
- Transfer speed limited by hard drive speed and USB 3

Availability

The Acasis 4-bay 3.5-inch USB 3 hard drive enclosure (EC1003) is available from Acasis online store.