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

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.

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.

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!!!

Recently, I replaced my DROBO 5D and DROBO 5N2 with an OWC ThunderBay 4 and an OWC ThunderBay 8, both equipped with Dual Thunderbolt 3 Ports. The reason behind this switch was the recent announcement of DROBO's bankruptcy and my previous experiences with their 5 series. In my experience, the DROBO 5 series has had issues with enclosures, power supplies, firmware, and overall reliability. Thus, I thoroughly researched various NAS and DAS brands and ultimately chose the OWC Thunderbolt 3 series for its exceptional build quality and performance. As someone who has had a positive experience with their Thunderbolt docks, this was a significant factor in my decision-making process. My previous experience with DROBO reinforced the importance of keeping data safety simple. The OWC enclosures provide me with the necessary RAID features in a simple and efficient manner. So far, everything has been working well, and I hope it continues to be that way.

Seems to work ok. But the packaging leads me to believe that it might've been a used unit. Crumpled envelopes...no instructions. No seals on the box. I've had pretty good history with OWC, so hopefully this enclosure will last. Still only in use for a couple of hours.

Great product, does what is advertised....

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.

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.