I'm guessing these are made for Monoprice by iStarUSA since they look exactly like the iStarUSA equivalents and also have iStarUSA branding all over. That being said I'm hoping these are cherry picked for Monoprice or held to a higher standard since Monoprice's quality is fairly known to be quite excellent. The iStarUSA equivalents have mixed reviews.
That being said, overall these are really nice units. I purchased three of these units to turn my full tower desktop into a server with hotswap capabilities. Due to some of the bad reviews for the iStarUA equivalents I checked it over for frayed wires, machining burrs, and also powered on the enclosures without any HDDs in case there was a short. Zero issues. All three looked great with excellent fit and finish. Loaded them with 3TB HDDs and burnt in the drives for over a week and everything has been performing as expected.
NOTE: These enclosures are rated for a max of 3TB SAS or SATA hard drives. I am not sure why it would be limited to just 3TB drives but I went with 3TB drives since I just also happen to get a great deal on those.
Only negatives are the extremely loud fans (which the iStarUSA equivalents seem to suffer as well), even when set to low power. IIRC, being 80mm fans they spin at almost 3000RPM at full speed. The fans do produce a lot of flow as I can feel a good amount of air being sucked in at the front, even when loaded with HDDs, but they are just soooo loud. This may not be a concern if you have this in a machine in a separate room or closet but it's quite annoying when in the same room.
It was so annoying that I swapped out the fans with some Artic P8 PWM fans which I ran directly to the motherboard for finer control. The plastic fan covering on the back was easy to take off and notch so that the fan cable could be run through.. The fans also required the mounting holes to be enlarged a bit for guide posts on the backplate. Not much work at all and its so much quieter. The stock fans are a 3-pin type but are slimmer than regular width fans and also use a proprietary connector so be forewarned in how you approach a fan upgrade. Since I wanted to run off the motherboard in the first place, I was not concerned about the proprietary connector.
PROS: -It's a mostly all-aluminum enclosure. The backplate and fan being plastic which are inconsequential. -Trayless hot swap! -SAS and SATA compatibility -Got a great deal on these on here during 2020 Black Friday
CONS: -LOUD fans. -Possible 3TB limit
Very happy with the product overall and would buy again.
I am really glad that monoprice has such a quality product and a decent price. I would have loved to have found a 5-in-3 on here, but I'm happy with the 4-in-3. All works well thus far. Have 8 of the drives plugged in to a pcie add-on card that provides 8 sata 3 ports.
PROS: Fit in my server chassis without incident. Tray-less hot-swap lockable bays are really nice. Seems to be built well. My system is kind of loud (three 120mm & 2 80mm fans) so I don't notice any audible increase from the contribution of these fans (I have three of them in my system).
The boxes are solidly built.
CONS: One of the lock pins fell out as I was installing one of the bays.
Not able to use angled sata cables.
Potential limit to 3 TB drives.
Lacks detailed documentation.
The locks feel a bit flimsy, I wouldn't trust them to keep someone (little) out.
One of my drive bays has a yellow/red led instead of blue.
