ThunderBay 4 0TB Four-Bay Thunderbolt 40Gb/s RAID Storage Enclosure with SoftRAID Premium

I'm a video producer and needed a more long term solution to buy single drives and 2 drive RAIDs over and over. Over the years I've used OWC, Lacie and WD drives so I'm familar with OWC and have never had a drive fail. After some research I decided to purchase this Thunderbolt 3 enclosure instead of a NAS solution (Considered a Synology). I also purchased my own drives (4x 10TB Seagate Ironwolf) instead of the Toshiba drives that are preconfigured on some Thunderbay products. Set up was a breeze and took about 30 minutes. Installing the drives was very easy and the Thunderbolt 3 connection is perfect for my 2018 Macbook Pro. I'll update this review as needed but after using for about a week here are my thoughts: PROS: ✅Very quiet. I was prepared for some fan noise but the combination of the enclosure + 7200 RPM Ironwolf drives works great ✅FAST! I just copied 400GB worth of footage from at Atomos drive in less than 30 minutes. NICE! ✅STURDY. This thing is a beast. All metal construction. Drive trays fit seamlessly. I like the locking mechanism on the front and the flashing light monitoring. ✅SoftRaid XT works great to setup and manage your array of choice. See below as to which version of SoftRaid you should use. CONS: ❌I'm getting some bluetooth interference from the drive based on placement on my desk. It's about 3 feet away from my bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. I need to do some more placement testing to mitigate but bluetooth interference is a known issue with USB3 and (I assume) Thunderbolt devices. ❌It wasn't clear which SoftRaid product to use. From what I gather there is SoftRaid Lite ($49, no RAID 5), SoftRaid ($179, full features) and SoftRAID XT (included with Thunderbay purchase, seems like all features). USE SOFTRAID XT AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY A LICENSE. There's an activation code on the bottom of the Thunderbay for SoftRaid XT. I almost paid for the full license :\

After dealing with a flakey Drobo for years I finally gave up on it and went back to doing JBOD on my Mac Mini. This comes with a SoftRAID license that allows you to run software RAID on this enclosure (the OWC license only allows for managing the OWC enclosure, but can be upgraded to a full license). I do like SoftRAID better than the MacOS software RAID, you can do all the basic's you would expect from a software RAID, plus it's monitoring and allows for verifying and certifying drives to make sure they are functioning properly before using them for your valuable data and on top of all of that it seems to be much faster. One thing to note is SoftRAID doesn't support APFS yet, but since my external drives were still running HFS+ it wasn't a problem for me. I liked it so much I bought a second one, I'm daisy chaining 2 Thunderbay 4's and a 30" monitor without issues off my 2012 Mac Mini's single Thunderbolt port. I like that these have the latest Thunderbolt 3 ports and have a dedicated DisplayPort for a monitor (which I am using). The build quality is great, you can hot-swap drives, and the added SoftRAID software is a plus. I would buy it again, and have already. I've tried a few Thunderbolt external enclosures over the years and this is by far the best I've used on my home Mac.

It is as far from "whisper" queit as it can get. Obviously, it depends on how quiet your other equipment is and how quiet your office is. This kind of constant noise is not something I want on my table - see video. I returned this device. Not worth the $$$ to me, but yes, it works fine for storing the files and softraid works fine as well. It would be a good solution for a server in another room where I cannot hear it.

Feels solid, very well built. I have 1x2TB WD Black and 2x500GB Hitachi Desk Star drives installed and accessing each as independent, bootable drives. It accommodates 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives. It does a good job of isolating drive noise. Drive access and fan noise are barely audible, never heard drives spin up. How fast? I routinely copy 1+GB files from the WD Black to the internal SSD in a 2018 mac Mini. This copy takes about .25 seconds! I love that is comes with 6' Thunderbolt 3 cable. I'm using the built-in Display port to drive a second 24" monitor. Overall very happy. Cons: Pretty hard to find but: 1. It's a light sleeper ;-) Super duper can't put it to sleep, while it does go into deep sleep when the Mini sleeps from the Apple menu, turning a monitor or Bluetooth mouse on or off wakes the box and spins up the drives. 2. Used in a home office environment, the blue power led is really bright, as in flashlight bright! When it wakes up at night and all 6 indicators light up, wow! quite the light show! UPDATE 6-29-19 I installed macOS Mojave on an external USB drive (WD Blue 2.5"/Inateck FE2010). That installation went wrong, ending with the 🚫symbol. Attempting to reboot failed, drive not visible. After installing the WD blue in the ThunderBay enclosure , the drive appeared in Disk Utility and after a successful First Aid run, it booted as expected. I suspect this means the ThunderBay is Apple APFS compatible, where the Inateck is not. Still lovin' the ThunderBay!

Using 4 x 4TB WD Red drives set up as two 8 TB SoftRaid 0 drives. I wasn't expecting lightning speeds, but maybe a little more than what I'm getting. BlackMagic Disk Speed Test registers as 275 MB/s Write, and 270 MB/s Read. Not bad. But when I tested just a single 4TB WD Red drive in the enclosure, it only gave me 80 MB/s Write, and 81 MB/s Read, which isn't great considering I got a much faster read/write speeds using my much cheaper Startech USB 3.0 drive bay (165 Write 176 Read).

This enclosure is an absolute delight to use with ZFS. I had no trouble connecting it or getting it to recognize my drives. Unlike some other enclosures I've used (like QNAP's), this one is *fast*, sturdy (no cheap plastic), and getting it to recognize all my disks at once was painless. No fiddling with dipswitches or struggling with a poorly-translated manual. I can't think of any critique, which is pretty rare. I haven't touched Softraid, as it doesn't support my configurations and I prefer ZFS besides, so I can't review it. It is distressing that they haven't provided a version for M1 Macs yet, though.

It took a while to “bless” the drives. But works great. Fast enough for a 22TB Final Cut Pro - 4hour project in 4k. I have 32TB in the box and it works great.

I was previously using a Drobo 5D for my direct storage solution, but it went out and I needed a replacement. I was reading a lot of negatives about Drobo so I looked into some other solutions. I wanted a drive enclosure using Thunderbolt 3 for the speed so that limited my choices, and this OWC model was my best bet. It was fairly easy to set up and use. The included RAID software (SoftRaid) was easy to use and configure for the RAID level desired. Note that the serial number for this software is on a sticker attached to the underside of the drive. I had to write to OWC to find out where the serial number was located as the software has a 30-day trial period before it wants the serial number.