OWC Mercury Elite Pro 2 Bay RAID Enclosure with eSATA and USB 3.2 for Dual 3.5 inch HDD's, 2TB External Hard Drive Enclsoure for MAC and PC

Very pleased in all respects with this product. Quality materials and build. Note: Specs say that this product supports USB 3.1. A newer version of the product supports USB 3.2, albeit at a higher price.My biggest fear with tech products such as this is that they require detailed instructions, and in many cases I have found those instructions to have been written by someone whose command of English is - how to say this - really, really bad. Conversely, the instructions and resources accompanying this product were detailed, clear, and written by a native English speaker with excellent command of the language.That having been said, there were a couple of ambiguities, which I describe here for the benefit of the next person in my shoes.1 The instruction sheet that came with the enclosure was great right up until the point where it said, “If you bought your own drives (my situation), go to owcdigital.com/format for formatting instructions. That page had lots of information for many situations. Generally, the information was well organized and clear, except:The page offered a downloadable application for formatting drives. I downloaded it, but did not use it because ultimately I concluded that it is intended for use on enclosures that OWC sells with drives preloaded (I bought just the raid enclosure (model OWCMED3ER0GB)). The page also offered a Windows Formatting Guide pdf written by OWC, which I did use. It was perfect.2 The Raid type setting switch on the back of the enclosure has four choices: IND, RAID 0, RAID 1, and Span. On arrival, the switch was set to IND. I was able to find no documentation that defines, ‘IND.’3 When formatting/allocating the drives, they showed up in Windows Disk Management as two separate drives, so I followed the instructions to allocate each of them. When finished, they then showed up in Windows Explorer as two distinct drives (which may imply that IND means JBOD).4 The instruction sheet gave the selection of the RAID setting as the final step of the setup process. I followed this order, which means that, when I formatted/allocated the drives in Windows Disk Management, the RAID setting on the enclosure was still set to IND. When, as the last step, I switched to RAID 1, the drives disappeared from Windows Explorer. The solution was to go back in to Disk Management, (where the disks had reverted to unallocated, except that what now appeared was a single disk showing the capacity of only one of the disks, an appearance consistent with RAID 1), and allocate again. After that, all was perfect. This narrative suggests that perhaps I should have switched to RAID 1 before formatting/allocating the drives, but since I did not do that, the result is unknown, so I urge caution.

I'm running two of these in my simple SOHO business and they meet my needs perfectly.They aren't the fastest devices out there, but if reliability is your main concern, they're superb values.They do NOT provide hot-swapping of drives, so they require some manual intervention. The drives don't slide into quick connect/disconnect trays. For that reason, many people might dismiss these little enclosures. You actually have to screw the drives into place (horrors!).I'm being facetious, of course. Yes, they require some manual intervention. They are not hot-swap enclosures. But, for a SOHO, that's not a show stopper. At least it wasn't for me.What they DO very well is hardware RAID support. For reliability, I use RAID 1 (redundancy). Plug two inexpensive drives in and format them into a 2-drive RAID 1 array and you're going. If you lose a drive, a green light on the outside of the enclosure will turn from green to red, indicating which drive to replace. Plug a new drive in and re-start. The RAID array will be rebuilt for you. No down time (other than the mechanical drive replacement). It just works.Yeah, you won't find these in typical data centers, but if you want to keep your business data stored reliably, these are amazing at that price point.I have no affiliation with the manufacturer and I am not in any way compensated for this review.

One of the best USB enclosures I tested. Using it in JBOD mode with Linux and ZFS. I've had it throw one error, and an ugly one at that, but it's mostly worked reliably with a light load for a couple of months.It has a real rocker switch for power so it comes back on if the power goes out and comes back again.

I purchased the OWC enclosure to house two drives for backing up a NAS. It took me about and hour and a half to unbox, install the drives, format the drives, and connect to the NAS. Tolerance on the cabinet are excellent--everything fit well. Instructions are easy to understand and illustrated very well. Before connecting the OWC unit to the NAS, I tested it with a Windows 11 machine. There I deleted partitions on old disks and reformatted them. When I connected the OWC unit to the NAS, I had to format the drives again for some reason, but aside from that, no problem. I started the backup process and see transfer rates from the NAS to the OWC ranging from roughly 35 to 90 MB/s.You can configure the drive management as IND, RAID 0, RAID 1, or Span. The OWC default setting is IND (Independent). I left the drive configuration to IND since I need to have two independent backup drives for my purposes.I rated the OWC Mercury Elite Pro 2 Bay RAID Enclosure five stars because the case tolerances are excellent, the installation of drives is easy, and connection to the NAS easy. I have my OWC tucked away in a utility area next to the NAS, so noise is not an issue. However, when I was bench testing it with my Windows 11 machine, the OWC was quiet--as quiet as the disk drives are. Fan noise is not an issue. If it were, I read on Reddit that you can replace the fan with Noctua NF-A6x25 FLX fan (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NQMESS?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title).Overall, the OWC Mercury Elite Pro 2 Bay RAID Enclosure serves my needs very well as a direct-attached-storage device to back up a NAS. The OWC is rugged, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to install.