OWC ThunderBay 8 0TB Eight-Bay Thunderbolt 40Gb/s RAID 5 Storage Enclosure with SoftRAID Premium

Well my Drobo 5D finally died. I lost all my data. I think one of the drives "healed" and after that things went downhill . Drobo is no longer supported either. It was definitely a great device, but had to move on So I read all the reviews and decided to give this 8 bay OWC a try. I love it! First its awesome looking Second its not that loud as others are saying, maybe if you are sitting right next to it, but I have in the basement next to my mac mini server, so It dont bother me one bit Third tech support is fast. I chatted online about a few questions, responded within minutes! Fourth I really like the soft Raid, it is so easy to use, even I did it! Only issue I dont like is that if I add another hard drive, the RAID 5 volume I already have cant be expanded without backing it up first and erasing it etc, but thats ok! great purchase so far!

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.

I love the additional storage and it has been a good performer but for some reason, it seems to take forever to read a larger directory. I can edit 4K video across the network on this though, which was a great surprise. Not sure what the issue is with opening folders with a 20-second delay sometimes. I put in fast drives but it is 112 TB with redundancy.

Good love it!

I ended up ditching the soft raid app and using the native OS disk manager for it. Also it is easily the loudest thing in my room which is saying something.

I bought this after my Drobo starting having issues, and I also found out it was no longer supported on my Apple Silicon Mac’s. I did a lot of research and this thing one out everything by far. I use this as my Plex media server and I wanted a direct attached storage versus a network detached storage and this item does not disappoint.

Have wanted one of these for years. A little spendy though but works great. EASY to set up. So far been a workhorse. Wish it was quieter though.

I have at least 5 OWC enclosures as well as enclosures from other manufacturers. it is important to keep in mind that these enclosures require softraid to run RAID arrays so software updates are a regular thing as well as invoices for those updates. I spend 3-4 hours each quarter or about 10 hours a year with softraid customer service dealing with some issue. The customer service people are great but they may be over their heads with this software. OWC is not a software company they are a retailer who decided to get into software and it shows. I have had a complete losses of data on a raid array using a Thunderbay with softraid that the customer service people could not prevent or explain. If you use this system I recommend simple raid arrays like 1 or 1+0. When I tried a raid 5 it resulted in a total loss of all data with no explanation from tech support. Another issue is if you want to move your enclosures to other computers. Softraid does not allow this unless the other computers use softraid, so keep that in mind. The enclosures also have short warrantees in my opinion. The OWC Thunderbay is the only enclosure I have had to throw away because it simply died and was out of warrantee. This was a different enclosure from the one that lost all data. It felt strange to me to throw away a 4 bay enclosure because my shelves are full of old enclosures from other companies that I simply retired because they were Esata or older Usb. I am not sure what causes a OWC enclosure to simply stop working and need to be thrown in the trash. The most reliable OWC enclosures I own are the older ones that do not use Softraid and I have never had to pay yearly fees to keep them running. I am not sure if I will buy any more OWC enclosures and I wanted others to understand that this is not set and forget system but one that will require ongoing troubleshooting and expenses.