QNAPSystems - QDA-A2AR QDA-A2AR DAS Storage System - 2 x HDD Supported - 2 x SSD Supported - Serial ATA/600

you would think between buying a qnap and a drive bay you would be provided the screws to mount the drive bay to the nas, that's not the case, both the qnap and this qnap bay product include screws for 2.5", however the bay mounts using 3.5 flathead screws which are not provided, and 99% of pc's / chasis come with non-flathead 3.5 or 2.5 which can't be used in the qnap (they won't fit), so... I have to order screws and just stare at the bay until they arrive... small things make a big difference...I'll update the review once screws arrive and i can actually use it in the qnap nas.

Despite this coming from the US and being quoted 3 weeks for delivery, it actually arrived in less than a week. However, that is the only positive news. Having bought this to put 2 WD RED SSDs in RAID1 (and save a slot in the 453D in the process), the minute I slotted the caddy into the 453D, it instantly switched off. Not shutdown - off. Tried a different bay - same problem. Removed the disks (to rule out the fact that one of the SSDs may have now developed a fault) and tried again - same problem. Tried an SSD on its own - fine. Tried a HDD on its own - also fine. Disappointing.

It does not come with the larger countersunk screws to mount it in the NAS! Plenty of screws provided for mounting the 2.5" drives though.Aside from the mounting issue, it's not a bad unit and is immediately recognised and easily configured in QTS 5.

My case has very limited space and I could only originally put two drives in my computer. I had to choose between two 3.5 or 2 2.5. instead of building a whole new computer I bought this and it works amazing data limits are restricted to SATA speeds however that is not an issue for me. I patched all the firmware on my Samsung ssds which are known to have bad firmware and then I installed them into these qnap bays. And I set them to RAID 0 to distribute the load between them and show them as one volume so I don't have a hundred letters of drive locations. And I'm aware that there is a risk involved with data loss however the data that I would lose is not important. I did not install Windows on this. I use it as a steam library drive.

I'm using these in a PC (DELL Precision T7810, refurbished off of Amazon) and replaced the delivered 1TB 3.5" SATA HDD using this unit and 2 Samsung 860 QVO 1TB Solid State Drive (MZ-76Q1T0B/AM) that are setup to use RAID 1.Since this was a "clean" rebuild, it was easy to install the SSDs in the unit, set it for the initial straight through (so NOT RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD), turned on the system, when I was able to get to BIOS SETUP and see the device and apparently both disks; I shut down again, and changed the DIP switches to RAID 1, and booted again. On the 2nd boot with RAID 1 set, BIOS SETUP showed the QNAP RAID devices only. From there it was an easy task to use ACRONIS to Duplicate the original 1TB SATA HDD with the installation source to the new RAID 1 SSD set.Runs like a champ.Since I'm not using straight through, RAID 0, or JBOD, I can't comment on those, but in this scenario, I expect RAID 0 to work similarly.I will probably buy more of these to address concerns with disk redundancy, where I want to solve that with RAID 1.

My expectation was that this adapter would present two individual SSD drives from one SATA adapter. Despite a variety of configuration changes, I was never able to get this adapter to properly recognized two individual drives. I did get the other options to work, JBOD and mirrored but this is not the configuration I needed.I did learn after returning this unit that in in addition to configuring this chassis for individual disks, you need some configuration in your host system to all it to see two individual drives in one SATA bay. This requirement is not clearly explained in the adapter documentation.I would not recommend this adapter if your requirement is for two individual drives unless your host system clearly supports it.

Got this for running VMs on VMware ESXI and Proxmox since there is no way to backup or mirror your drives within these types of operating systems. There is no way to do mirroring in software so you have to have a hardware based raid device which this is. Raid 1 and 0 modes work without issue (just make sure you re-format the drive when changing modes). I doubt there is much performance increase for SSDs when running in raid 0 since you are still limited by the sata bus but it might boost 2.5 inch hard drive performance. As far as size goes it fits perfectly in different systems in any 3.5 inch drive bay. Screws are lined up perfectly unlike some other converters I have seen.

Very good product, but new release of QTS doesn't support jbod mode of it (only raid 1 or 0).I want to mount in it 2 of 4tb ssd's and have 8 tb ssd-storage at one slot of NAS, now it not possible (only on previous releases of QTS).