OWC Thunderbay with 4x2TB SSDs

 I am interested to get above and was wondering if  anyone has experience with above 4 bay drive with SSDs as a main drive connected to IMAC?
Many thanks
Rene 

I have used an OWC Thunderbay with 6x14TB drives a couple of times working on movies. The one problem I had with it is that I did not know I needed the software that came with it. The people who set it up took the sticker off (people on the production, not at OWC), so I was unaware that there was even software involved. Without the software the drive was causing all kinds of power issues. It would randomly cause my comp to turn off and would force an abrupt shutdown whenever I unplugged the USB-C cable. Once I downloaded the software (a product key comes with the drive) I stopped having problems.

I am not sure what the speed of the drive was. I want to say somewhere around 300 Mb/s, but thats mostly a guess. It took around 45 minutes to offload a TB of footage, not quite as fast as I was hoping, but its a TB. Then again, we were using spinning drives; your SSDs should be plenty fast.

Don't let my power issues scare you off. Just know you have to install the software that comes with the drive and you won't have any problems. The case is solid. The drive I had was sitting on a mobile truck for four months and I never had any issues with losing footage or anything like that.

I have the previous version using hard drives not SSD’s. I echo the previous post, it is very important, or at least in my case too, that the proper software is used with it. Somehow or another I got mine mixed up with a different version and had licensing issues. It all cleared up when I used the correct package.

These are good units.  I have 4 bay and 6 bay enclosures with both SSD's and hard drives.  A couple have been running for a couple of years.

The units come with a license for SoftRAID, the software you use to create and monitor your volumes.  Their support is outstanding.

A tip for SSD based raids.  If you are using one of the raid formats that protects you from one of the drives failing, SoftRAID recommends that you configure the raid in raid4 saying you will get faster performance.

Mike

Personally I'm kind of bummed that these new units use software based RAID, the older USB 3 boxes that they replaced actually had a hardware RAID controller inside the box which means that there was no siphoning of CPU power to handle the RAID tasks.  It also means that software corruption or an OS change couldn't break the RAID.  I would never buy a software based RAID box.

E.J. Peiker wrote:Personally I'm kind of bummed that these new units use software based RAID, the older USB 3 boxes that they replaced actually had a hardware RAID controller inside the box which means that there was no siphoning of CPU power to handle the RAID tasks.  It also means that software corruption or an OS change couldn't break the RAID.  I would never buy a software based RAID box.

Interesting.  The only raid I have had that failed was a Promise 8 bay unit with a hardware raid.
 
I have owned a number of OWC enclosures, none of which have failed.  

Obviously, your mileage may vary.
Mike

mikeojohnson wrote:

E.J. Peiker wrote:Personally I'm kind of bummed that these new units use software based RAID, the older USB 3 boxes that they replaced actually had a hardware RAID controller inside the box which means that there was no siphoning of CPU power to handle the RAID tasks.  It also means that software corruption or an OS change couldn't break the RAID.  I would never buy a software based RAID box.

Interesting.  The only raid I have had that failed was a Promise 8 bay unit with a hardware raid.
 
I have owned a number of OWC enclosures, none of which have failed.  

Obviously, your mileage may vary.
Mike

I said nothing about hardware failure, what I said is that if you have to change OS or somehow the software RAID program gets corrupted and needs to be reinstalled, you lose the RAID array and have to start over.  Hardware failure is an equal problem with both types but software RAID adds another layer that can fail...

I just got the Thunderbay 4 for Christmas, empty, and put in my own drives.  It did not come with a software license and OWC wants to charge for their SoftRaid.  You get SoftRaid Lite already installed if you get the box with drives. I thought I would try it with out their software and see how it performed.  In MacOs Catalina I was able to create a RAID in the Disk Utility app. So far I have not seen any performance issues, or seen any need to buy their software. They were not SSDs however.