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

OWC indeed lives up to its name, you get what you pay for, and some more. The box is excellently built, sturdy fully metal construction, comes with plenty of mounting screws for both 2.5 and 3.5 drives, compact, has a TB3 daisy-chaining port (not that I use it, but it's there) and a built-in line power supply with the standard IEC 60320 C14 power inlet — no external "brick" power. There's also a T-slot for a Kensington lock in the back. The front grille has a key lock and is easy to remove for dusting or accessing drive trays. Each tray is held in place with a thumb screw, and SATA drives are hot-pluggable. With 4 Seagate Exos drives, the hottest SMART reading is ~37⁰C idle, up to ~45°C at maximum disk load (parallel 2×2 ZFS resilvering) at 22⁰C ambient, and the fan is very quiet. Comes with a quality TB4 cable which you should better use, it's top-notch. Also included are a power cable and a carrying bag. The enclosure connected to ASUS NUC with no issues, I've never seen a single reconnect even under full load. The kernel in Debian Trixie recognised the device immediately as 4 /dev/sdX dev nodes. As with any TB or USB device, the assignment on Linux is random, so mount disks by their label or GPT UUIDs. Windows remembers the "drive letters" assigned to GPT UUIDs; there you don't need to do anything special. The blue LED that turns on when the connection with the computer is established is rather bright; not an issue in a comm closet, but you may want to cover it with a bit of tape if you sleep in the same room with the computer and the enclosure both powered up. When you shut down the computer, the unit spins down the disks, powers them off and goes into sleep mode. Spin-up is not staggered, but there is enough power to spin-up all 4 drives at once. Whether idle disks go to spin-down, depends on your OS and configuration. For dusting, unlock and remove the front grille and blow air from the front, aiming along the drives into gaps between the tray front panels. There is a direct air path from the middle gap to the fan. Blow or vacuum the grille, too. Note: This is JBOD, not a RAID, seen by the host as 4 separate disks.

Excellent product...just be aware that the fan is not whisper quiet. Good enough for most work but, because this enclosure sits in my dual purpose edit/mix room, I cannot use an open mic without contamination from the fan noise. None the less, for most users this is a great product.

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 fast Cons: • 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.

Works as expected. Speed is good and drives are easy to swap in and out. You can hear the mechanical drives in it but I don't find it bothersome. It has more to do with how noisy a drive is itself than the enclosure.

Just bought this as an upgrade to my Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 which was a 4 disk RAID5 array. Immediately became suspicious that there is no hardware RAID setting on the enclosure. Downloaded the OWC SoftRAID software as instructed which requires a whole registration and checkout process (lame) and then installed it, facing nothing but problems and issues launching the software: SoftRAID Error An internal part of the SoftRAID Monitor has stopped functioning properly. Please quit SoftRAID and relaunch it. Had to jump through hoops, enabling all kinds of permissions in software privacy settings in order to get the thing to even launch, and then it didn't allow me to set the drives as a RAID5 array. It just says my SoftRAID Premium trial has expired. So I go to enter my serial number on the OWC website and it tells me invalid serial number!!!! Bro I just purchased this off of Amazon yesterday!!! Are you kidding me??!! I'm 5 seconds away from sending it right t f back to Amazon. Bottom line: doesn't recognize my RAID5 Array, doesn't give me any easy option to set it up as a RAID array, the software sucks and doesn't work right, and the serial number says invalid. Thanks OWC, what a failed purchase this was!!!

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.

Wow! You get what you pay for. I have used JBOD arrays for decades. This thing is commercial grade. Sturdy as anything Sun Microsystems sold back in the day. Solid metal case with an internal power supply. No ridiculous wall wart or floor brick. I’m using mine with an old M1 Mac Mini to serve up a half dozen RAID 5 Time Machine volumes for the Macs in the house. Impressed! The only reason I give it 4 stars is the obnoxious blue LED power indicator. Completely obliterates the disk lights and flickers with a seizure inducing frequency when switched to “Dim”. My solution was black duct tape over the LED. A minor annoyance.

Great four bay storage unit. Does everything they claim. More importantly it work seamlessly with my MacBook

Funciona de maravilla con MACOs Sequoia, muy silencioso

Sólido. Buena velocidad. Muy bien presentado.

OK funciona perfectamente . El softrwaare SoftRaid hay que suscribirlo aparte despues de instalarlo.