20 Best Thunderbolt 3 Enclosure (2022 Updated)

I have owned a ThunderBay 4 using Thunderbolt 2 technology. I’ve used that since 2016 with my 27″ iMac. I’ve recently bought the Mac Studio and also purchased the OWC ThunderBay 4 using Thunderbolt 3 technology.

I moved my disks from the old ThunderBay 4 to the new ThunderBay 4. The mechanics of that change were simple and went well. After connecting the ThunderBay 4 to my Mac Studio and powering it up, all the disks read properly.

I have 2 points I would like to mention and put them into the disappointed category. They are not show stoppers. 1. The ThunderBay 4 cable: The ThunderBay 4 with Thunderbolt 3 technology came with a 3 foot Thunderbolt 2 cable.

That was just long enough to connect to my computer provided that I built a little mounting box to get it off the floor. This keeps it out of some of the dust and permits the 3′ cable to connect. I put it under my desk to keep the noise from the fan in the ThunderBay masked a little.

Now, with the ThunderBay 4 with Thunderbolt 3 technology the cable is just of 2′, so I need to rework the mounting for the new ThunderBay 4. I didn’t think I was going to have to do that. Now that I see the high prices on Thunderbolt 3-4 cables, I understand why OWC kept the length short.

Still, it was a bit of pain that I wasn’t expecting. 2. The ThunderBay 4 fan: I hoped that, since 2016, the ThunderBay 4 could have been designed/manufactured with a quieter fan. Unfortunately, it has the same noise.

I guess some folks don’t mind that on their desktop, but I don’t like it. at all. I’ve paid a premium to get the Mac Studio that is quiet as a mouse. Even though the ThunderBay 4 is underneath my work table, the sound of the fan is annoying.

I certainly wouldn’t place it on my desktop and beside my computer set up. Sitting on the table top will just amplify the fan noise & vibration. If anybody can suggest a fan that is probably more expensive, but quieter, and will fit in the ThunderBay 4 enclosure, I’d be thrilled to hear about it.

That’s it from me. Jack.

Good airflow. The front cover is perforated and uses a larger 92mm sized fan which is welcomed. Drive vibration nicely dampened. Though in the era of Apple silicon Macs with silent or quiet idle noise, the stock Sunon fan is unacceptable.

It has an annoying and noticeable whining noise from the fan motor. Spec sheet on the OWC website states it’s a temperature controlled fan, I don’t believe this to be true since the fan speed is at constant max from the moment it’s turned on.

I did what a previous reviewer did and bought a 3rd-party fan (Noctua NF-A9 FLX). However, I went one step further and also bought the Noctua NA-SRC10 low noise adapters which are pre-made voltage resistor cables.

The NF-A9 FLX comes with one ultra low noise and one low noise adapter. You just need two screwdriver sizes and some steady hands to change out the fan. Unscrew the two, top most screws first. Connect 3 low noise and 1 ‘ultra’ low noise cables between the fan and enclosure connection for 500RPM fan speed which will be nearly silent or use 4 low noise cables for 600RPM.

If you are constantly writing to the hard drives than I probably wouldn’t want to go lower than 1,000RPM which you can get by using just the ‘ultra’ low noise cable included with the fan purchase. I can hear the rushing air at 1,000RPM but this would be okay under a desk or photoshoot noise environment.

Oh, and I would recommend velcro or plastic zip ties to tidy up the long cable connection for 500-600RPM to prevent the plastic adapter ends from touching the metal enclosure so it doesn’t amplify vibration noise.

OWC if you’re reading this. Add a PWM version of the Noctua fan with a smart temperature controlled system to control fan speed.

My Thunderbay 4 (with Thunderbolt 3) is a fantastic product built to last a lifetime. My main peave with the purchase is the non-availability of Softraid software. When you read the OWC webpage for the Thunderbay 4 it says “includes Softraid” and further down the page says “OWC enclosures ship with the XT version of SoftRAID”.

The box my Thunderbay 4 came in clearly says “includes Softraid license”. Well, the license is not included and here’s how I found out: I downloaded Softraid and tried to use the serial number on the Thunderbay 4 box – this did not work.

Then, I wanted time on the web trying to find out how to obtain my software serial number but nothing worked. Then I found a small slip of paper inside the packing box (attached here) with a sticker on it saying that “Softraid is only included with units that ship with drives”.

This is a really cheap stunt and I am not happy with OWC as a consumer. OWC calls the Thunderbay 4 “professional grade” but this is not how you deal with professionals like myself. As mentioned, the bad news about Softraid is on a sticker on the sheet so this was clearly an afterthought by OWC, and a very bad one in my opinion.

Had I known that the Thunderbay did not “ship with the XT version of SoftRAID” I would still have purchased the product, but finding out the way I did is not the way you deal with professional or any customers, especially if you want them to come back.

In the end I purchased Softraid Lite for almost $50 US, but doing so made a bad taste in my mouth. Regarding the question below, yes I would recommend the product to a friend, but not without explaining the Softraid issue to them first.

If you need a Thunderbolt3 housing that is speedy while keeping the SSD’s thermal low, then this is it. It seems to regulate the transfer speeds to not go above 1400MBps in order to keep temps down. I am using this enclosure with a 2TB WD SN750 Black, and my friend is using his enclosure with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus.

The OWC housings seems to be very reliable and keeps the drive cool while maintaining a very constant throughput when copying large files. I am very impressed. I almost bought an Orico USB 3. 2 Gen 2 20Gbps housing, but it seems that built quality might not be there, and with the TB3 housing, I can enforce the TRIM command which would not have been guaranteed over a USB connection.

TL;DR : A very reliable, robust unit, which should give me a long life expectancy with my NVME.

From a case perspective, I liked the design, the heatsink transfer material, and the idea of the plastic holder that adheres to the top of my MBP. In reality, I found that the case heats up too much, causing the plastic holder to come unstuck from the MBP case, and falling off onto the table.

Nice for transport, if you are in the habit of not disconnecting it when you are transporting your laptop. I used an Island Platinum 2TB NVMe which worked well. However, when I needed a larger size, the 4TB NVMe would not work in this case, and I had to buy an additional case.

I’m not sure how you would check compatibility as it would seem that none of the vendors of this type of media do much testing. Overall I’d give it a good rating, tho not great. My other case, from GLOTRENDS, actually gave me better read/write numbers with the same NVMe cards, using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test.

I’m using this with an M1 MacBook Air and a Crucial CT2000P2SSD8 drive. Crucial claims up to 2400 MB/s read and 1900 MB/s write for the SSD. In the OWC Envoy enclosure, the Blackmagic Speed Test results were 1475 MB/s read and 1295 MB/s write (5 GB ‘stress’).

I repeated the test several times with about the same result. The Mac recognizes the OWC enclosure as a Thunderbolt 3 device (40 Gb/s), and it is plugged directly into one of the Mac’s Thunderbolt/USB4 ports.

The SSD is formatted as APFS. I have no idea why the OWC + Crucial SSD seems to underperform. Perhaps the Crucial P5 SSD would come closer to its specs. In actual use the enclosure + SSD seems much faster than USB3.

2 gen2 (or whatever they’re called these days) drives. The enclosure conducts heat well, and is very well constructed.

Purchased this set up on recommendation. Had it set up to RAID 5 for an edit drive. it’s so safe, they said. When it did work, I found the drive to be incredibly loud. But that was the least of the problems.

SoftRaid reported the drives to be healthy throughout, but one day, of course 4 weeks after warranty expired, the drive stopped mounting. I tried the basic disk repair, then diskwarrior – nothing could get it to mount.

I removed the hardrives, reconnected them via SATA to USB connectors and ran RAID recovery software, no luck. OWC Tech support kept recommending to “just replace the failed drive and the RAID will rebuild.

” But none of the individual drives had failed, SoftRaid reported no errors on the RAID as a whole nor on the individual drives. Maybe SoftRaid is garbage software? Either way, I’m out of options except for purchasing a new enclosure.

Although from what I’ve read, it would likely initialize the drives once placed in the new enclosure. Also not feeling like investing any more time, money or energy into OWC drives. It’s loud, it’s not reliable.

It necessitates a full back up, so may as well purchase a less expensive set up and be able to purchase the main edit drive and a back up for the same price. RAID is not a replacement for BKUP will be on my gravestone!.

The physical product is great, large drives and a solid metal housing, and they’re pretty fast. The problem I have is with the software, SoftRAID. First time setting up I it did not go smoothly, had to do a bunch of reading and research to even show up as a drive on my mac.

I have an M1 Mac and this drive does not show up eiter. They advertise this a plug and play, it’s not. You’ll likely need to do technical reading, validation, lots of restarting your comp, and waiting.

The SoftRAID program is strange, it will randomly pop up windows recommending a update. If you unplug the drive from your computer it pops up at least seperate 4 windows notifying you. I’d really recommend using a different software for this.

I can’t. How many OWC products and had always thought that they were quality until recently. For the purposes of this review I’ll stay specific to this product though the issue encompasses Thunder Bay, the thunderbolt 4 hub, and the thunderbolt 3 dock.

First, it wouldn’t mount. (Latest greatest os on 2020 iMac 10 core i9, 128gb OWC-ram) after back and forth with OWC and Apple I brought it in and had the logic board replaced to no avail. I determined that it must be some old ktext or extension or whatever so I wipe my system, started fresh and got it to mount every time.

Loaded software back. not much but Adobe CC and Microsoft for sure. Opened Premier Pro project an a separate ssd volume, media an thunder bay. After 25 minutes the entire box freezes, and 1 minute latter the computer reboots itself.

Every time. I’ve been dealing with their cs people since the end of February and still nothing has been resolved. None of my other gear, from glyph, caldigit, Samsung, Seagate or even G-tech EVER causes this crash.

I’ve given them to this week before I have to consider my options.

This is the second thunderbay enclosure I’ve owned. The first was a Thunderbay 4 TB2 version which has worked well for years. This new Thunderbay 8 was packed well and in great shape with no signs of wear and tear.

The cable packed with it is far too short for practical use unless it’s right next to your workstation (mine is a 2019 imac i9) but I knew this going into the purchase and got a 6 foot active intel certified TB3 cable that works perfectly well.

Speeds are as expected. I already owned a copy of Softraid XT from the previous enclosure, which is what I use. I’ve now certified 5 14TB exos,1 6TB exos & 1 Samsung 870EVO SSD with no errors and built a raid5 volume out of 4 of the 14TB drives, maintaining 1 as a cold spare.

Everything working well. I’m running the 1 raid5 volume, the 1 lone spinner as a backup drive and the 1 SSD as t bootable backup clone of my main drive. Fan is a bit loud as others have noted. I purchased a Noctua NF-A9 FLX 92mm fan to replace the stock one and use the “ultra low noise” adapter cable to lower the rpms.

This lowered the noise significantly (but it’s not “silent”) Truly, the fan noise is secondary to the noise of the drives shuttling around as you zip through media on the raid volume but only solution there is to buy quieter drives or SSDs.

See attached raid5 results with 4 14TB exos. 42TB volume with about 32TB remaining when test was run.

I had 2 OWC ThunderBay Four-Bay units attached to my 2018 Mac Mini to create storage for video editing and photo/media storage. They are Thunderbolt-1 devices and I had them daisy-chained then connected to the Mini via a TB1 to TB3 adapter cable.

That worked well, but I decided to replace and older NAS by adding some disks and SoftRAID to my media server. So, I replaced the 2 Four-Bay units with one Eight-Bay device which freed-up the older units for other uses.

The conversion was simple: I just put the 8 drives from the 2 units into this single device and powered it up; SoftRaid automatically found all the drives and I was set. The performance of a single, direct, Thunderbolt-3 connection is better than the daisy chained TB1 devices.

My home Media server (an older Mac Mini with TB1 ports) now has its own 4-drive bay storage, and I have a spare that I have yet to find a use for. I was super happy that I did not have to do any sort of backup/restore or high volume data transfers to get my existing drives to work in the new unit.

As an 8 bay enclosure, it works well. BUT Softraid is not compatible with macOS Monterey. Specifically the KEXT will not install and requires you to degrade the security of the OS to accommodate the KEXT.

Then its a crap shoot as to whether it will load again on a reboot. Way to fidgety and time consuming to make this a good or very good product. The 8 bay works fine. The software doesnt. If you plan to use it with macOS Raid 0 or 1, it should be fine.

Also, its not clear what version of Thunderbolt it supports, it would be good to see the exact specification supported.

I got this product from OWC (Thunderbay 4 mini drive enclosure 0 drive) as a solution to accommodate a number of (new) SSD s into my external drive plan with a single cable as a DAS for fast external access to my photography raw files.

I wanted a device that would be capable of very fast throughput for fast read/write performance supporting the fastest transfer rates but also compatible with both what I have now (MBP 2014) and the future machine I hope to get in the next year (2016+ MBP).

A singe drive measures over 300Mbps read/write speed while the RAID 4 array measures 730 Mbps Read and 1004 Mbps read using AJA System Test Lite and Blackmagic DiskSpeed benchmarks. That is fast enough for most formats of video on my MBP.

Your speeds will definitely vary with source machines drives and connection methods. Works on all counts. I can t say enough about the support I got from SoftRAID pre and post sale. I had lot of configuration questions and expectations on configuring the internal four drives and using it as a RAID array with additional partitioning of a drive larger than others.

First about the OWC Thunderbay s mechanical assembly. It is a very sturdy black painted aluminum case. It stand on four rubber feet and is very quiet when the fan runs it is practically inaudible in a quiet room.

On the front you have a keyed lock LED s on the front for power drive access (4) and ventilation holes for the fan powered assembly. The front panel completely removes with the key. It removes exposing four drive trays that simply plug in to the rear frame.

The front panel secures the drives from becoming disconnected with an integral bumper strip. The drives can hot-swap” however in the case of a RAID array that will be rather ineffective to yiour operation if a drive is removed for any other reason than replacing it with the same size and rebuilding an array.

If you will use the enclosure to house media as formatted as JBOD then hot swap will work for you just be sure to dismount the drive before removing. The system will need to be reattached to T2 port to mount on your host computer or re-powered.

I usually disconnect the power plug after ejecting the drives. Therefore this hot-swap feature isn t needed and no power switch is provided. At the rear you ll find a 72W DC power connection jack requiring the supplied external power pack two Thunderbolt 2 jacks used to loop between other devices (multiple drives monitors etc.

Note that this enclosure is Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps) and is only downward compatible with Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps). The drive trays are metal and well grounded to the case for static control. Your drives screw to the tray with four screws each and are supplied.

Spares are available but only as a set. The overall documentation and product quality is very good. This is a good value for the product provided. I give it a 4 star rating based on my list of pros and cons below.

This is a user s review not paid or in any way compensated by the distributor. Would recommend!”.

I had reservation about a software RAID instead of an hardware one. After having experience with SoftRaid of OWC, I was fully convinced that SoftRaid is a GREAT software, it seems really the best ever.

Very quiet which was the main reason I selected this unit over other manufacturers. I was using another thunderbolt unit from another company. but the fan and airflow through the other company s unit made too much noise for my taste.

I use SSDs that do not require much cooling as does HDDs so this unit is perfect for me (though HDDs would work well also with the unit) I work with Video and Audio recording using a Mac Pro 2013 so the ThunderBay 4 mini is perfect for the cost and my usage! Highly recommend it!.

I bought OWC ThunderBay 4 mini because I wanted to have enough RAID storage for my trips to take my laptop, this box, and cameras. I intend to save my video captures there and potentially use the whole system as my video editing workstation.

Note that there are two diskless versions of the OWC ThunderBay 4 mini. One comes with SoftRAID bundled (I didn’t see this one at BHPhotoVideo) and one without (which I bought here). You will need SoftRAID if you want to create a RAID configuration (I think OWC will sell you one if your box doesn’t come with it) Overall impression: the unit is well built and well designed and can handle from standard 2.

5″ SATA disk drives to 2. 5″ SATA SSDs. However, I wish it didn’t have a lock. The key in the lock sticks out like a sore thumb. I keep the key in the lock because the only way to close the front cover is to lock it.

I’m afraid I’ll lose it if I lock it and put away the key. I trust that my family members will not walk away with my SSDs, so there’s no need for a lock. Noise: my work area at home has 35dB ambient noise, according to my Apple watch.

When I place my Apple watch near the fan exhaust of OWC ThunderBay 4 mini, I get the measurement of 37dB. In my opinion, this is almost noiseless 🙂 Speed: write speed of 1033 MB/sec and read speed of 748 MB/sec according to Disk Speed Test by Blackmagicdesign will handle all my 2160p24 work.

Your speed may vary depending on your SSDs or 2. 5″ disks, cable, etc.

First, let’s just get this out of the way: It’s not bad for the price. It does what it’s supposed to do. Now a couple of minor gripes (definitely not deal breakers). I traded my big loud legacy Mac Pro for a new M1 Mac mini.

The sound level in my office fell to zero, I never knew how much noise my old Mac made until I turned it off. But then I added the ThunderBay mini and my office was silent no more. The fan is not loud, but when you go from zero to some noise, it really stands out.

It has a bit of a white noise sound (which some people like, but not me). It would be nice if it was a bit more less noticeable. And with only three SSDs installed at the moment, it seems it would be better if the fan only came on when needed instead of a steady speed all the time (when running, the fan does shut off when sleeping).

Or possible a higher quality fan would be quieter. Of course, I’m sure that would add to the cost, but I’d trade up for that. The second little criticism is the access door. If you are going to hot swap drives often, it would be nicer to have a better access door.

As it is now, the door comes completely off with the key lock holding the door onto the enclosure. I do not really need a locking enclosure, so I found this operation a bit clunky. If I was going to swap drives often, a hinged door would be better (another cost factor, I’m sure).

All in all, it works with a few small inconveniences.

Very well made and performs as specified, but could definitely be improved. The issues are not deal breakers for me, especially because of the price and overall quality. 1) The fan is a bit noisy. It is always on an runs at one speed only.

A variable speed or controllable fan would be a big improvement. 2) The key lock on the access door is a bit over kill for a home office. A little clunky and unattractive. I understand the value of the lock in a workplace, but not at home.

3) The OWC Logo is bright and always on. There is no power switch on the unit. It would be a really nice improvement if this LED would turn off when the system is shut down or when no drives are mounted.

I would happily pay a little higher price for these features. Overall I am very pleased with the ThunderBay 4 mini. OWC products are excellent.

My initial impression of this product was pretty good. I was impressed with the build quality and the looks. After installing my card and downloading the software the experience was as expected. I played for a few hours and went to bed.

The next morning I started up my computer and ran into a “Thunderboldt device may not work properly” message. Cutting to the chase here, I’ve tried everything from reinstalling drivers to a clean installation of windows with moderate success.

I have yet to pinpoint the exact causes of my woes but the “true plug and play” experience should not be trusted as advertised. Also holy hell, it’s much heavier than I imagined it would be(which I guess is a testament to it’s build quality).

People don’t really talk about that but I guess this is a good thing. RGB is worth it when it decides it’s going to work. TL;DR: I had a lot of trouble getting this to work consistently with my laptop (Lenovo yoga 15″) your mileage may vary depending on your hardware and if they have worked out the software bugs.

I wish I could say I love this product but unfortunately it is too glitchy. Ethernet drops about 1 minute after initial login despite pulling an ip, dns, and gateway. Manually setting the configuration doesn’t help either.

Also, USB dropouts are common, although functionality normally restores within 30 seconds to 2 min. Last but not least is that the eGPU will completely disconnect at random times (so using this unit while on video conferences is not recommended).

I have contacted Razer and received less than subpar support. Basically their response after about a month has been please reinstall the drivers, and have you tried turning it off and back on again (I’m paraphrasing, but not by much).

I tested the Razer Core X Chroma with a Lenovo X1 Carbon and a 2019 Macbook Pro 15. Both have experienced the same issues. Unfortunately I am past my 30 day return policy with B&H or this unit would most assuredly be going back.

For now it serves as northing more than a large paper weight. As a note, this review is not a reflection on B&H as they have always provided excellent service and support. This review is solely aimed at the Razer and more specifically the Core X Chroma as many of their products are perfectly acceptable.

Have a Dell precision laptop with a Quadro P2000, it struggles to do any decent gpu processing. Great i9 but gpu lacks. The Razer eGPU totally solved that with a desktop card. Now running nvidia 3080 off that laptop and its quite literally 5 times quicker.

The USB ports dont seem to work as well as expected but thats solvable in other ways. Probably didnt need the Chroma version.

I bought the Sabrent USB 3. 2 Type-C Enclosure for around $36 to use with an NVMe memory stick. The price was a bit higher than I would have liked, but just about as cheap as I could find it anywhere else.

It works flawlessly, and I can definitely say that it’s obvious what you’re spending your money on. It’s crafted from a hefty slab of aluminum and the included cable is short (something I prefer) and substantially thick – not some cheap, thin, low-bandwidth accessory.

The “instructions” are minimal, but it’s easy enough to figure out the mechanics of getting things working without them. The only heads up you may need is this: on the inside of the top lid is a thermal pad that contacts the NVMe sick when the lid is shut.

Be sure you peel off the copper-colored, protective paper to uncover the blue thermal pad. I’m not sure the instructions indicate to do that!.

I chose this enclosure because I wanted to use one of my new M. 2 drives as a fast transfer and travel drive. What I did not know at the time was that M. 2 drives come in two main flavors: SATA and NVMe.

Hint: Make sure you understand the difference before you buy drives! The SATA M. 2 drives have two slots. This unit is very easy to open and insert drive. The little tab to hold the end of the drive down is a tad stiff, but it works.

I like the detachable cable as I prefer that to integrated cables. I find the unit gets a bit hot while in use. The main failure cause for M. 2 drives is heat. I am hoping that the heat I feel on the outside of this enclosure is due to the heat being transferred away from the drive.

(So I’m hoping it’s a designed heat sink).

I purchased this to make an external boot drive for my 2015 MacBook Pro. This device is probably the fastest way to add external storage to my machine since the Thunderbolt 2 ports are far faster than the USB3 ports.

Since this Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 enclosure is self-powered, you can use the Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter in reverse, making full use of the MacBook’s Thunderbolt 2 port and getting super fast transfer speeds, making it suitable for use as a boot drive.

I don’t have any benchmark utilities, but I copied a large VMware image from the internal Apple SSD to an external 2TB FireCuda 530 and saw an Activity Monitor peak write speed of 1. 6GB/sec, which is super fast.

The case gets a little warm, but that means that it is effectively sinking heat from the M2 drive. I used this to successfully build and test a system upgrade to Mojave, and will continue to use this to occasionally run modern OS versions that I don’t want to permanently upgrade to due to software compatibility issues with old apps I still need to run.

Right now, it’s Velcro’ed to the laptop lid and holds a 1TB drive waiting to test Catalina, so I can see which apps break before deciding if I want to take the plunge. All in all, it’s perfect as an external drive for my older MacBook Pro, it’s well priced, and extremely well constructed.

I’ll continue to use it for the rest of the life of this machine, and it’ll still be useful if I upgrade to a more modern machine later.

The type-C shaped Thunderbolt 3 port has a NOTCH and THEIR CABLE can plug in, BUT NOT THE OTHER SIX LONGER CABLES I own? I didn’t return it – I threw it in the trash. Just on principle. This is a monumentally dumb thing to do and you should be embarrassed.

You can’t use any other thunderbolt 3 cables with this enclosure because there are two protrusions on both sides of the type-C port, and the very short cable they supply is the only one i can use without doing something drastic to the enclosure itself.

Look at how I have to use this thing in the photo. It’s really inexcusable and I am extremely disappointed because otherwise this enclosure is truly excellent but i’d rather have one i can use a different cable with that isn’t stupidly short.

It performs well, the disk benchmark image is an encrypted APFS file system on a Samsung Pro NVME drive. the only thing in my house any faster is the one inside my MBP and MacPro6,1.

No tools required. Comes with 2 thermal pads and high quality (short) cable. The way the cable fits into the case protects the internal connector from stress and provides a good connection. Crazy fast speed.

Note: I have only tried it on Windows 10, can’t speak to Mac usage. Unit used with Gigabyte Aero 15.

This was an excellent buy! Just as it was advertised, practically new, I would say; and it came in its original box and packaging, too! It works like charm in my Mac mini late 2014 using a thunderbolt 2 cable and a TB2 to TB3 apple’s adapter and a MSI Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card.

Great packaging, original box. All clean, seems great, i Will try It and ser how It goes.

It is a good one. And as a picky buyer, I would say it will be perfect if the original cable included.

I bought this as a high speed JBOD (just a bunch of disks) enclosure for a Mac to take advantage of Thunderbolt 3’s much higher top speed and better support in macOS compared to a cheaper USB enclosure.

To try and quickly summarise: Pros: • Sturdy construction with a solid metal chassis. • Disk trays fit snugly and securely with room for even larger 3. 5″ drives. • Very high transfer speed (ideal for SSDs, more than you’ll usually need for HDDs).

Cons: • Trays are not screwless; disk must be screwed into the tray before inserting. I would have preferred a trayless system similar to the Icybox RAID backplanes. • Stock fan is ridiculously noisy.

I would have rated this four, maybe four and a half stars as I’m disappointed at having to screw in drives on a modern disk enclosure (sprung slots are so much easier!), especially one this expensive.

But I’m force to drop it down to three stars for the absurd volume from the stock fan; a quick google search finds an optimistic estimate from the fan’s manufacturer of 28db, but I measured closer to 45db with no disk activity and only a single disk! Another quick search finds the Noctua NF-A9 (92x92x25mm 3-pin fan) which is not only quieter at top speed, but moves a greater volume of air with a higher static pressure at its LOWEST speed, for only £15 from Scan (at time of writing).

No matter how you cut it, a £300-400 Thunderbolt disk enclosure should not contain a fan of such poor quality that it makes it significantly noiser than the computer it’s attached to! Very, very disappointed by OWC on that, as the actual performance and functionality is otherwise excellent.

If like me you need an otherwise good Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, then I’d still recommend it for the job, but be aware that if you want to place it in a quiet office then you’re going to want to buy a better fan, which just shouldn’t be necessary for a premium priced device.

For various reasons, my back-up scheme works well with JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) and not with a Raid drive. Looking at reviews of reliability, convenience, and utility I decided on the OWC. I wanted thunderbolt 3 for speed, but not four separate electric plug ins and four separate lines to a hub, then to the computer.

Getting rid of the installed Raid 5 I found impossible until I connected with customer support at OWC. Though we went through several trials of removals, this was finally accomplished. The support person was very patient and helpful.

The instructions with the unit were outdated and useless. My impression was that Raid 5 was still a bit of work in progress. However, that was cleared and I was able to convert to JBOD, and I had 4 new drives in one container with one power cord and one thunderbolt 3 connection to my computer.

It is working exactly a I desired, and is compact. Fits well into my new office cabinets without a slew of cords.

This is a great drive. I am a video editor and it has great speeds enough for 4k video. This is actually my second one because I wanted the newer thunderbolt 3 port. My old one is thunderbolt 2. I have never had any drive failures or issues.

My only issue is with the updated softraid software on the new M1 MacBook Pro. It is a mission to get it to work. I’m still having issues where the drive doesn’t mount or my max immediately crashes due to a kernel panic.

Hopefully owc updates the software soon.

I really like the tool less design and how compact it is. I was able to install a Samsung 950 Pro and have it detected by MacOS in minutes. My only complaint is how short the included cable is (about 6in) and how tight the area around the connector is.

I have a longer 40gbps TB3 cable I wanted to use with the enclosure but it wouldn’t fit in the space. The enclosure also does get a little warm, not sure if this will affect it in the long term.

Many USB SSD enclosures use a different brand controller chip that is not compatible with certain USB hosts. The StarTech is not the cheapest, but don’t waste your money on the others – they may not work.

And it is FAST!.

Performance is very good. Runs hot. 🙂

The product is a s described and works as I wanted it to with the Samsung NVMe drives I was given.

Incredible! RAID and USB single drive capability. Installed five 4. 0TB drives and installation was snap – took a total of ten minutes. Set my unit up as RAID-1 for drive 1 & 2 (there I store critical data for the redundancy and backup protection offered by the RAID-1 configuration) and individual 3.

0 USB drives for drives 3, 4 & 5. Connected to my USB 3. 0 BUSS on one of my Windows computers and it mounted immediately. One additional note, I formatted all the drives as NTSF and used NTSF for Mac (Paragon Software) on all the Mac computers to mount the drived.

I set all the drives as share drives via the Windows computer and now, all the drives mount as share volumes on all the networked Windows and Mac computers. Works perfectly. One-quarter the total cost of a 20TB NAS RAID system!.

Works great. Have it running with 4 Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives, and keeping one bay spare for expansion later if I need it. First two drives are running in RAID 1, which just worked. Came with a screwdriver with a magnetized tip, which was very useful when fixing the drives into the carriers.

I was looking for an enclosure that connects to my M1 Mac mini with sufficient speed. The option to have the first two bays be Raid 1 or 0 is a great! I used Raid 0 for increased speeds for working with 4K footage.

I didn’t need a Raid 5 setup and with the increased sizes of drives these days even Raid 5 is becoming less viable for data loss security.

I took a chance on this item in an effort to use the Samsung 960 PRO Series – 2TB PCIe on my iMac Pro. The adapter I used was the Ableconn PEXM2-SSD M. 2 NGFF PCIe SSD to PCI Express 3. 0 x 4 Host Adapter Card.

I went with a non-StarTech adapter because at the time of purchase this was one seemed to be rated better by Home Essentials Direct users. My goal was to achieve same, near or faster read/write speeds than the internal storage on my iMac Pro.

The good news is, the StarTech Thunderbolt chassis connected immediately. I gave this 4 stars simply for the fact that it worked. I was very apprehensive as there were literally no other reviews. But I assure you it does work.

I ended up not keeping this item because I could not achieve anywhere near listed speeds for the SSD. Listed speed for write/read on the Home Essentials Direct page is 2100/3500. But I achieved 950/2300 respectively.

I don’t think this was the fault of the StarTech item, but I can’t say for certain. My guess is it was a combination of the adapter and slower thunderbolt cable. If your situation was anything like mine (buying Apple) and you’re looking at this as a cheaper solution to expanding storage, my suggestion is bite the bullet and just go for bigger internal storage.

If you’re looking at this for connecting other components such as a video card, I think chances are strong it will function. Edit: I forgot to mention that this comes with a fairly short thunderbolt cable and you’ll probably want to purchase a longer one.

Also it comes with power plugs for both U. S. and Europe. Edit 2: I managed to raid together 2 Samsung X5 m. 2. The raid speed of these drives greatly outdoes my iMac Pro’s internal read/write speed.

Just make sure your drives are connected to separate buses.

I am using StarTech. com TB31PCIEX16 as the eGPU for my MacBook Pro laptops 2014/2015 to run Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter with my 32inch 4K monitor. Product works perfectly with my old Mac thunderbolt 2 laptops.

It also connects well via Apple Thunderbolt Monitor thunderbolt port and via thunderbolt 3 dock in device-daisy chaining. The Chassis also improves graphic performance and internet browsing experience on my new windows 10 laptop with a built-in Intel UHD 620 Graphics.

WebGL Aquarium Test showed 90% GPU boost across all my laptops. I installed the AMD Radeon RX550 graphics card that does not require an external power supply. The fan is very noisy on Chassis so I replaced it with Noctua NF-A6x25 Fan, 3-Pin 60mm.

I also bought longer thunderbolt 3 cable as included cable is very short.

Built quality is very good. It offers 2 thunderbolt 3 port, one for input, one for expansion. Beside that it offers one display port. The port configuration is exactly the same as Akitio Node mini. But it is longer than Akitio Node mini in dimension, making it more adaptable to be used as GPU enclosure, even though it is not officially endorsed.

Nevertheless this enclosure has a green colored one piece motherboard while the Akitio features a black 2 pieces motherboard. So StarTech has done some of its own design here. It has been running for 4 months without any problem.

I installed a ASUS phenix GTX1050ti in it and bought a 12V 120W PSU to offer more power. The stock 70W PSU is a high quality one. The stock 60mm fan is very noisy. Be sure to buy a high quality 60mm fan with 3pin non PWN control to go along with this box.

Overall I highly recommend this Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.

Got an new Mac Studio and needed home for the 7 drives out of my old Mac Pro (4xHDD + 3xSDD). These were RAID volumes using MacOSx SW RAID. Dropped them into the enclosure and they all showed up on my new Studio.

Tested performance and it was as good as when in Mac Pro, maximum for SATA 6G. My issues are two fold: 1) the system is loud when compared to the MacPro. Both fan sound (not temp controlled) and HDD seek.

2) one of my 2xRAID HDDs was marginal, with occasional SMART errors. This RAID’d pair would not work in the enclosure. To solve the fan speed, I purchased a quiet fan with variable speed with rubber mount bushings from Amazon.

For the seek noise, I built a small enclosure with air vents and sound absorbing walls to place over the unit with care to maintain external air exchange. For the marginal drives, I reinstalled them in the old Mac Pro and got my data off of them before they die.

The old Mac Pro didn’t have any issue mounting them.

I have been terribly disappointed in this RAID. It’s loud, slow and buggy. Not acceptable for the price. LOUD: I had read reviews of it being loud, but thought “I can deal with that. ” I have found the noise very distracting and annoying.

SLOW: It’s also slower than I had expected (between 300-500MB/s read and 200-300MB/s write. ) But the biggest annoyance is that it consistently “hangs” while workinggiving me the spinning wheel. It can take up to 30 seconds to recover from one of these hangs, which is incredibly frustrating when working.

BUGGY: And finally, the recommended SoftRAID software has caused me MANY MacOS Kernel Panics! Their tech support had me initially creating reports and sending it to them after these kernel panics, but ultimately just stopped communicating with me.

I don’t know if they gave up or what, but I haven’t heard from them since September, in spite of sending them additional messages.

I bought this unit to test compatibility before committing to a purchase. I’m using this to replace a Synology and needed to be sure it would work with my setup. The enclosure is great. SATA controllers were detected by ESXi 7.

0u3 without issue, and works with passthrough to a guest VM. This unit uses JMicron Sata controllers which is different than the 4 bay variant which uses ASMedia. I decided to send this back and purchase an empty one since I’ll be using this with a VM running TrueNAS which will handle RAID.

I really wish OWC would have listed/allowed the purchase of an empty DIY enclosure directly in Canada via Home Essentials Direct.

Now that m. 2 NVMe SSD greater than 2TB are so much cheaper these days I wanted to upgrade my original 512MB to a 2TB on my AIO desktop. But I didn’t just want to toss the 512 away when it was still very good.

Went through the listing of enclosures on Newegg and saw one I thought about. A friend was also upgrading his SSD so I asked what brand enclosure he’s got or getting and it was the same I was looking at too.

All that changed when I saw a YT tech review of the Plugable. The tech reviewer on YT mentioned he tried other brands but often that meant having to use tools, like jewelers screwdriver to open it up or seal it and use a mini Phillips to hold the SSD in place.

After seeing that video I decided the Plugable brand was just what I’m looking for because the only tools needed are your hands and fingers. Looked at Newegg and they had it in stock and a great price.

It does have vents on the sides to dispense heat. So with any such device, keep it away from moisture, dust, lint. If you need to carry it around I’d suggest a nylon drawstring pouch to keep the Plugable and the USB cables together too.

Important reminder before you buy is to make sure your m. 2 SSD is NVMe and not the SATA. My desktop that got upgraded is like most these days that use NVMe type SSD but I have a 2017 model laptop with a 256MB m.

2 SATA. So if I decide to upgrade my laptop’s SSD I can’t use the same Plugable model. I’d say construction is very well done, easy to use, and even if you use equipment without a USB-C port it comes with a cable to use the old USB-A ones.

Overall, I’m very satisfied.

I posted this info for others who may be wondering about the hardware. I bought a couple of these Plugable devices from Newegg a couple years ago (2019). At that time they used a JMicron JMS583 controller.

I just (2022) bought one of these newer versions and it uses a Realtek RTL9210 controller. In my opinion that’s an improvement. The old and new devices look identical.

Worked perfectly with a Samsung EVO 970 M.2. A little pricey, but I buying reliability. Plugable makes some great stuff. Great product here. 5 stars easily.

I’ve been running this enclosure with two RAID-0 arrays: a 4TB array from 2x 2TB SSDs, and an 8TB array from 2x 4TB HDDs. The performance is superb. I get every drop of throughput that I expect from the SATA SSDs.

The ThunderBay 4 definitely delivers on performance. The chassis itself is very nicely built. The door opens and closes easily. The tool-free trays are easy to slide in and out. And the drives plug into the backplane with a satisfying, secure feel.

However, the stock fan that was included was unacceptably loud. When I first turned it on my wife scowled at me and said, “What is THAT?”. We had just purchased a new M1 iMac which is effectively silent.

She had gotten used to that and then I turned on the ThunderBay. The noise level was something else. What good is the silent iMac when the enclosure sitting next to it is roaring with fan noise? Luckily, the fan is a standard size and is easily replaceable.

So I did that. I replaced it with a Noctua NF-A9 FLX. Ahhhh. It’s nice and quiet at the computer desk once more. So I give the ThunderBay overall 4 stars. It performs well and the materials and workmanship are great.

If it came from the factory with an ultra-quiet fan like the Noctua it would be 5 stars for sure. But due to that exceptionally noisy stock fan, I have to take a star.

I am a repeat customer and am very happy to recommend OWC. I have purchased several pieces of gear from them, including a refurbished MacPro and two ThunderBay RAIDs. I am always satisfied with the products, ordering process, shipping time, and customer service.

As for the ThunderBay 4 Four-Bay External Drive Enclosure with Dual Thunderbolt 3 Ports, It arrived quickly and works as expected. I am running it as a 72TB RAID 0 for editing video and audio. I am backing that up to an older ThunderBay (USB 3.

0 model), which is formatted as a RAID 5. Both machines work great. I bought mine empty and configured them with Seagate drives (Seagate Exos X18 18TB drives in the new one, and Seagate IronWolf 12TB drives in the older one.

) I highly recommend using enterprise level hard disks in these. The Exos X18 drives are fast and quiet and I expect them to last under heavy use – though NO hard disks last forever, so back up your important data!.