OWC ThunderBay 4 RAID 5 with Dual Thunderbolt 3 Ports (0GB RAID), Includes SoftRAID XT

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 received my OWC Thunderbay 4 and set it up. It was simple and straight foward initializing the drives using the Disk Utilities app in MacOS. So far, the Thunderbay 4 works perfectly. The fan is very quiet. It's not silent by any means but also isn't noisy or disruptive to me. Yes, it does sound like a small fan is running at very very low sound dbs.I'll update this post for quality / longevity after I've used it for a while. At this point, I strongly recommend the drive bay.

tiny screws hard to handleKey was hidden in bottom of boxOnce set up, it works like a charm

Previously I had an OWC Drive Dock that held 2 drives, and it had a USB connection. That one would frequently disconnect, and thus it was totally unreliable. I decided to give OWC another chance, and I purchased the ThunderBay 4. I was hoping that it would be more reliable since it uses Thunderbolt 3 rather than USB. And yes...it solved all of my connection problems! I've been using it constantly for several months with my M2 MacBook Pro and an OWC Thunderbolt Pro Dock. It's been working flawlessly. Yeah, it costs a lot more than the 2-drive USB dock, but the reliability is worth it.Pros:• 100% reliable, no disconnects• Solid metal construction. It's heavy!• Thunderbolt connection is fastCons:• I wish the drives were easier to install and remove. They are held in by screws. I'd rather have a tool-less installation similar to a Synology NAS.• I wish it was possible to close the front panel without locking it with a key. I don't need that kind of security, and now I have to worry about losing a key. Right now I'm just storing the key in the keyhole. That's fine, but I'd prefer not to have a key at all.Those are some minor gripes though. I would still highly recommend this device. I'll give it 4.5 stars, and round up to 5.

I bought this hoping I would not have to use the OWC proprietary software to setup raid on this system, because I needed to plug it in to multiple systems where I cannot install any additional software. I was very happy to find that I could put in 4 drives and all four were recognized separately by MacOS. I was able to use MacOS Disk Utility to very easily stripe them into a RAID0 set that is readable on all systems with no software required.My transfer speeds are a blazing 1100MB/s to this unit from SSD via TB4 on a MacBookPro M3 Pro!! Thanks to the black friday 24Tb Iron Wolf sales I now have a 96Tb RAID0 enclosure for under $2k. Amazing!Obviously Apple RAID can only do RAID0 and RAID1, but RAID0 is all I need right now to move huge amounts of data from one location to another. When all these data moves are done maybe I will install the OWC software and switch to RAID5.

Fast, Mostly quiet, Lotta room to move stuff around.

I continue to have major problems, not only with the horrible hardware but also with the software/driver. At times the TB4 drive will simply disappear from the desktop, other times will not mount and other times will not eject, even using the "force eject" option. In this case (when the drive will not eject) the system will not restart or shut down with the Apple menu. In this case, holding the power button is the only solution. Tech support is simply useless. They will not exchange the enclosure since, "it is out of warranty".------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I purchased this brick based on good reviews and OWC's long history with Apple peripherals. First I needed tech support to get this thing working, download the correct SoftRaid monitor because the one their website lead me to was not working with Mojave 10.14.5. As the tech walked me through the process he pointed to the four drives that he claimed were the correct drives to use. Unfortunately he uncorrected pointed to three drives in a drive case that had years of photography on them. Tech said follow the prompt, initialize the drives and bang-o the three drives were erased! Ok, the drives were sent to Seagate Data recovery, two were so damaged that they were unrecoverable! Now how can simply initializing drives damage them? After that was done and nothing could be corrected I decided to move on. I finally had the enclosure working with the four drives that were intended for the box. The brick was so noisy that my wife complained about the racket that was created. I had to disconnect the ThunderBay4 after each backup because of the distraction.. Tech does not know what to do about it. Next stop... Catalina, 10.15.1... Do you know that there is a big problem with these crackerjack boxes and Catalina? IF you can get the system to go to sleep with this decrepit crate attached, when the system wakes guess what happens? A kernel panic, the system crashes and then restarts! OWC tech support claims that they don't know why and blames it on Apple, you know how this goes. After two months of back and forth, still no support for Catalina and guess what? This thing still sounds like a rickety clickity clackity train going down a bent track. So frustrating. If there was some way to return this piece of crap and have access to the RAID5 data I would do so. OWC, NEVER AGAIN!

This drive took a long time to receive. About a month. But it was worth the wait. It was quick to set up and has performed well in the 4 months since I've used it. It is quiet and has an auto sleep mode, which I like. It's very fast.