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

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 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.

Easy to set up with either SSDs of Hardrives.Well made and fast.Use as individual drives of raids.Came with a Thunderbolt 4 cable.

Got the Thunderbay for management of my sample libraries for my little music studio. Phenomenal device and even though I don’t use raid (each disk contains different libraries), this bay is amazing! Fast thunderbolt speeds - especially with 4tb ssds for 2 of the 4 bays. The soft raid software is nice although I will not be using raid.

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 :\

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.