Great value for external array with enough space for a RAID5 or hot spare
I did not notice the construction quality or harmonic vibration issues others mentioned
Solid extruded aluminum frame. Front door is a bit flimsy, but is just a dust cover. lights are hard to see with door closed because of intentional plastic diffuser.
Internal markings indicate ORICO - so similar origin
Annoyances:
Performance - chipset is JMB575 and JMS567, which limits performance to 250MBs - this should have been noted because even a pair of rotary drives can swamp this.
Fan noise - the fan is not bad, but sandwiched tight against a limiting back plate intake, it makes quite a bit of noise. I spaced fan with a little tape and used a Noctura ultra low noise speed limiter cable adaptor I had to bring the noise down. Too hot without any fan. No thermal fan control.
Fan Filter - does not exist - quite a bit of dust is sucked in from back (at least in my environment) but easily blown out.
Power on after loss - I shorted the power switch so it would come on if power was interrupted, not as big a deal if on a UPS
No passthrough of drive model or serial number - just annoying (crystal disk mark sees it, but not everything)
If connected to a hub, make sure to turn of hub power saving or it will disconnect on sleep as mentioned by another user.
Power - 4W empty, 10W with 5 drives idle, 35-40W with 5 drives active, peaked at 48W
I don't prefer the 4 pin external power unit, but it is OK. It is rated at 12V 6.5A
Overall, happy with function for price, but biggest issue is expecting full 5Gbs USB 3.0 and only getting 2.5Gbs.

I bought this to house a RAID array for my nVidia Shield Pro and KODI. It works well for this purpose.

It has a nice solid feel about it, with a very thick and substantial housing. It is very quiet, and has an 80 mm fan which could be easily replaced if it fails.

The performance in RAID 5 mode is disappointing. It is supposedly USB 3.1 (with USB-C connector). I added four Seagate IronWolf drives. Never saw more than 30 MB/sec while writing to it with a Lenovo ThinkCentre. Speed is not terribly important in this application for me, but it did slow me down quite a bit when I was copying content to it.

Here's the important thing to know. I come from an IT background. I am accustomed to using a utility to configure the RAID. It does have a Windows utility (and a Mac version). I set the array up using the Windows utility. My objective was to format the array as NTFS using a Windows 10 PC, and then copy everything over to it with the PC. The Shield will handle whatever file system you throw at it.

But, when I hooked it up to the Shield, it would not work. Shield recognized it, but said it was corrupt.

I tried plugging it into multiple computers, including Windows 7 and Mac. Only the Windows machines would see the array.

So, I formatted it again using the DIP switches on the back of the unit, and it was then available on every platform. I assume when you set it up with the Windows utility, it writes some sort of disk signature on it that only Windows can recognize. With the DIP switch config, you can still see it with the utility, but it does limit flexibility. For example, it is not possible to set up two discrete arrays.

I downloaded an incomprehensible hot fix that is supposed to fix an issue with sleeping. I don't want it to ever sleep. All you could do with the hot fix utility is run it, with no information about whether it was successful.

Every once in a whie, I hear the thing make noise like the disks are spinning down and back up. It was concerning at first, but it has yet to create a problem five months later. I hope it remains reliable.

Finally, despite the quality feeling of the enclosure, the fron door is flimsy, and the drive trays are plastic. Metal trays would have been nice for cooling (although cooling has not been an issue).

The drive LEDs are blue when idle, and purple under access. They are actually quite hard to see unless you are lookikng straight on at it. This is fine, as the resting place is in the living room under the television.

The lights and lack of noise make it perfect for living room entertainment purposes.

I think this would work very well with a Mac, too.

...is it worth spending money on a cheap unknown RAID enclosure rather than spending double or triple the amount on a trusted brand?

The short answer is yes... with caveats.

I was looking for a RAID system to support video editing. I purchase this one by mistake actually; I meant to buy the 5-bay Yottamaster unit but messed up the order, and was too late to cancel. The advantage of the 5 bay unit is that you have better capacity efficiency in RAID 5, because only 1 out of 5 drives stores the parity data rather than 1 of 4; it's also theoretically a faster spec. However, when I asked Yottamaster whether the real-life speed was comparable, they said there is no significant speed advantage of the 5-bay unit.

My concern was whether the speed and reliability of this cheap unit would match up with bigger brands. However, if you read the reviews of some of the known-brand units, people can be quite critical of the reliability. Unfortunately I won't find out how reliable this is until a drive fails, which could take several years. I tried pulling a drive while the RAID 5 system was online and in-use, but this unit doesn't support hot-swapping of drives, so I just got a beep and an error. Once I replaced the drive it re-initialised and came back online fine, apparently without loss of data. Obviously key to a RAID 5 system is how it copes with rebuilding data in the event of a drive failing; I wasn't easily able to test this.

Speed-wise, I'm getting around 200MBps write and 250MBps read performance from this, which is more or less exactly what Yottamaster said I'd get. This is about 2-2.5x the speed of the same drives used standalone. However, it's not quite the 3x theoretical speed you might be able to eke out of RAID 5. To be honest, if you want a lightning fast RAID enclosure, spend more money. For me it's not a major issue, as I can edit from SSD if I want something quick (something like a T3 SSD is around twice as fast as this RAID enclosure, on my system which supports USB3.0.)

Setup is not difficult; you set the DIP switches as per the manual (and sticker on the rear of the unit), use a pin to press the Reset button on the back, then power it up. I didn't read the manual to start with and hence missed the bit about pressing the button. If your unit shows up as just a bunch of disks, this is probably why.

The unit is quite a lot quieter than I expected. There's an active fan in the back but with 4 drives and the fan running, it's pretty unobtrusive. The build quality is pretty much what you'd expect; the front door is a bit flimsy, and you can't properly see the drive status LEDs with the door closed. The plastic drive trays are perfectly functional but nothing to write home about.

So if you're after a cheap and functional RAID system, I can't see too much wrong with this one. If you want high performance, then spend more money, as you'd expect really.

After some initial frustrations, I'm pretty happy with the unit. I'm running RAID 5 with 5 x 16 TB drives on a Mac mini M1 with Monterey. Here are the ways I dealt with each issue I had with the unit:

1. The RAID setup instructions are not clear - I finally found a YouTube video that steps through the process, but I can't post the URL due to Amazon review guidelines. The most important takeaway I got from the video was to keep the reset button pressed prior to turning on the unit. Then I waited about 15 seconds afterwards before letting go of it.

2. The sleep mode kept on turning unit on/off (only an issue for Macs) - Their "Sleep Time Setting" firmware is only available for the Windows platform. If you search around the web, they let you know that there is a KeepAlive Software for the Mac, but no link provided. Because there are at least several KeepAlive apps out there, It's hard to know which one they were referring to. It's not a huge deal, but they could have at least provided a link. I ended up writing a simple python script, which i execute on startup, that updates a file to keep the drives active, but it's just a hassle that customers shouldn't have to deal with. BTW: I had to have disk activity every 4 minutes to prevent it from sleeping consistently. At 5 minutes, it would still occasionally go to sleep.

3. Finally as others have mentioned, the fan could be better - For now I just keep the front door open and have a little fan to push air into the unit.

It's only been a few weeks and I haven't done any performance tests yet, but for $152.99 + tax, it's a good deal.

NOTE: looks like the price of this item has gone up, just like everything else recently.

I don't love any of the various enclosures that I have purchased mostly due to performance not meeting my expectations. This one is mostly acceptable here are the positives and negatives.

Pros
Looks great sitting on the desk
No problems so far
1. Easy to remove and add disk drives
2. I have filled the enclosure with 5 drives only had one issue so far where one drive would go off line. So far this seems to be more of a problem with my computer going into sleep mode and not waking up properly (a Mac studio). Or it could be an indication of the fragile back plane. Have not had the problem repeat since disabling sleep mode on the Mac though so seems to be problem with the computer. I also moved the drive to other slots and had the same problem but just with that one drive and no others. Again problem has not reoccurred now that my computer does not go to sleep,
3. The manufacturer included two size screws which was good.

Cons
1. With the front panel closed cannot really see the disk activity lights
2. The back plane to plug in the disk drives seems to be fragile but only time will tell
3. The disk holders are plastic (seems to be very fragile plastic). Again only time will tell how this lasts
4. Speed is better than some and worse than others. Using SATA 6 Toshiba N300 NAS 10TB drives which have a theoretical speed of 600 MegaByes/ second but I am seeing only 183MB/s write and 205MB/s Read according to black magic disk speed testing software. I realize that I will never get 600 but many people seem to get at least 250 with these drives. I have used USB3 cheapo external open enclosures with these drive that were faster (only a little bit though like 210)