OWC Mercury Elite Pro 6TB External Hard Drive Enclosure for 3.5 Inch SATA Drives, USB 3.2 and USB-A/USB-C Thunderbolt Connection, Professional Plug n Play HDD Enclosure with Power Adapter

I owned 2 lacie rugged drives one that connected via thunderbolt the other used usb-c. I had bought the usb-c one because they stopped making the thunderbolt drives. When the first 2 tb lacie started to fail it came with software that basically locked it and said that i should try to back it up asap. I bought the 5 gb usb-c version (orange) for that purpose. I noticed that they seemed to sort of battle each other to load up anywhos it was not very long till i started having issues with the newer drive. One day upon starting up the usb-c 5 tb newer one would not load at all. I tried disk utility i tried everything i could but it would not even show up on the list. I called for support and am supposed to send them back now to see if the lab could try to get my important files off of them could take up to a month. I can't go without my drive space so i looked for a new drive this time i didn't want to get a lacie or seagate as they are easy to work with but never seem to last very long. I have had previous experience with OWC and anything i've gotten from them has always been great quality. I bought the mercury elite pro in 6gbs i figured that when i finally heard from the lab if something was saved i could put it on my new drive and just have the others as backups for that. What i got was a beautiful great quality harddrive that was super easy to connect and set up. What i had not planned on was i got a complimentary (1 year subscription) to Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. I had not used that software prior and it now is protecting my drives from malware,virus, can clone drives and back up my computer. I don't know if the new software is what did the trick or maybe the drives were dying intermittently but day after i installed my missing drive is now suddenly appearing on the desktop. I quickly took advantage and used the new software to copy everything from both drives. I now no longer need to send the drives to the lab and will be calling about sending them back to exchange for working drives. I now have all my files safe and sound on a stable harddrive and 11+ months left of protection. I am over the moon with this product and with the company who rushed it to me. When installing and setting up i couldn't find the serial number needed so i quickly got online and was chatting with an agent within 3 minutes where i was told it is on a card that was in the box (code is on the business card sized card) which i promptly found and had no issues. My point is if i had a problem it would have easily been dealt with since i could get assisstance so easily.

I owned a previous version of a Mercury Elite Pro Dual RAID drive bought directly from OWC. It frequently caused unexpected ejects from my Mac and eventually caused a drive failure after 3 years. The fan was loud too.I say all this because I was hesitant to replace that drive with another OWC drive. I bought 2 of these empty enclosures and installed one of the remaining drives from the prior enclosure in one, and a brand new drive in the other. Both work like a charm. Are completely silent and the speed of the interface is a huge improvement. For the price, I'd say this is a bargain.

The OWC Mercury Elite drive enclosures have been very dependable for me. When one failed after 5 or so years, I naturally ordered the latest version. Right away I noticed it was a new design, an inch shorter than my others. It also had more problems disconnecting form my MacBook than the earlier enclosure. Now after just 15 months the enclosure has died (cables and power supply tested good). Not sure if this was just a random early failure or an unreliable new design. Will look at other vendors.

Should have trusted the reviews. At first glance very well made but a critical flaw. The power cord does not seat fully and thus comes out way too easily.

I like that this works like my Apple AirPort Extreme Time Capsule with the Time Machine software . It was very easy to set up and install. I now feel secure in knowing my data is backed up daily without fail. For those of us with less Computer skills (Moderate) it was great to find something easy to work with. Also looks good visually with my iMac.

I needed a new direct attached storage solution for use with my 2018 MacMini and Backblaze cloud backup service and I wanted an enclosure that I could replace the drive in later on and, I wanted a drive that could take advantage of the USB C speeds of the 2018 MacMini's USB C ports.I've used OWC products before, I had one of their external BluRay burners back in the day and a few of their portable USB (bus powered) HDD enclosures so OWC has been on my radar. The enclosure itself is all aluminum with an aluminum stand that has silicon skids on the bottom, it firmly holds the drive upright so it fit on the desk top right behind my 34" ultra wide monitor. It has a nice beefy USB Type B (3.2 gen 2) port, it comes with a USB Type B to Type A cable but I bought this Tripp Lite cable to use with it rather than using a Type A to USB C adaptor. The cable itself seems well made and made a reliable connection: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08298VJY9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1I departed from my usual MO in purchasing hard drives by getting this with an installed Toshiba desktop drive that OWC populates their enclosures with. At the time of purchase this was $229 for the 6TB capacity and it is a 7200 rpm drive and I felt it was an affordable choice for both the HDD and enclosure and, when you purchase this with the drive installed it carries a three year warranty. And I figured I didn't have to worry about getting a OEM hard drive from WD or Seagate that might not be warrantied, as I've read about many times in hard drive reviews. So not having had any previous experience with a Toshiba drive I'm hoping that it lasts. After shutting down the computer each day I'm also powering off the OWC drive.The enclosure does not have an active fan. The case acts as a heat sink to dissipate heat that the drive creates. I transferred about 3TB of FLAC music files and general documents in a few hours. I haven't clocked the speeds but it is much faster than my previous Seagate 4TB bus powered drive.My MacMini recognized the drive right away and I used OWC's included drive formatting utility and it automatically created an HFS+ volume and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. There is some question of whether to use APFS on newer Mac's or HFT+ when formatting new drives but HFS+ is supposed to be more optimized for mechanical HDD's whereas APFS is more optimized for SSD drives.Overall it has a very high quality feel and appearance, the only negative is how it was shipped. It came in its box with styrofoam end caps on the drive and while it’s own packaging was sufficient I would have thought it would be shipped with an outer box for added protection. I will report back after having used it for a few months.

Looks like good construction. Good transfer speeds, easy to setup. Supported my 12Tb NAS PWDIS drive just fine!