OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad RAID Ready (JBOD) 4-Bay Storage Enclosure

I've owned one of these for 2.5 years and it has been so perfectly reliable that I bought a second on Amazon 9 months ago. Unlike some other devices I've used, this one works great with whatever I put in it and has never disconnected unexpectedly.I've used it with large spinning disks (18 and 20 TB IronWolf Pros) as well as SATA SSDs (Samsungs in 500 GB and 8 TB sizes) and everything in between.I didn't buy it with the RAID software as I didn't want that feature. I'm using it with a M1 Mac mini that functions as a home server, mostly running Plex to serve my media, DVRing over the air content, and acting as a Time Machine target for a laptop. Not the end of the world if this thing loses a disk and goes down as I've got local and online backups of everything.

The first bay died within 3 months. Not a good product. Tried to get tech support from OWC. No response.

This unit is really quiet and looks so good. Adding two 16 terabyte drives took only a couple of minutes. It's also smaller than I expected. It's about 2 inches deeper than a Mac Mini. The design of the lockable front door allowed me to open the door and cover the LEDs with some black tape. I like my room dark, so it's nice that I can cover the LEDs and not have to see the black tape, which disappears behind the door. As long as it lasts, I'm happy with my purchase.

Bought two of these units for long term storage for a several Macs in our small audio and video enterprise. I loaded one of the 4 bay units with four WD Red Plus 14TB drives configured as two Raid 1 mirrored drives. The second unit was configured with just two WD Red Plus 14TB drives (two empty bay for future expansion). The assembly was quick after watching one of OWC's installation videos--which probably wasn't needed if like me you've built a computer or assembled an external drive before. As always, follow instructions for installation of both the enclosures and the hard drives. For example, wear a grounding strap when installing the drives. The units powered on immediately and I was able to easily format the units for use with my Mac computers. I chose to forego SoftRaid on either of these units--based on my specific needs at this point, but also because of some of the negative reviews I'd read about the long term cost and reliability of SoftRaid. Both units have run trouble-free for the past month. Besides long term reliability, I was concerned about how quiet the units would be, the amount of vibration I felt (both units sit on desktops relatively close to the computers they are attached to) and operating speed. The units are very quiet and relatively vibration-free. After I assembled the units and attached them to Macs on my network, I had to copy a large amount of data from several Mac and smaller external drives. This took about as much time as I had anticipated and the even with this relatively heavy amount of writing taking place, the units remained quiet and relatively cool. It's too soon to talk about long term reliability but based on reviews of the OWC enclosures and the WD Red Plus (enterprise level hard drives), I am hopeful. I will update my review if my experience suggests otherwise. I think this combination of enclosure and drives provides an effective low cost, reliable long term storage for our video and audio data.

Clean design, same color/feel as aluminum Apple products, plenty of air circulation. Would buy again.

One of the better mechanical designs in this product space.Power supply is inside so you only need a standard 3 prong wall to device cord.Drive can be noisy because it’s front panel vibrates when you have spinning drives inside.I have put in SSDs only as a result the the supply seems to have no trouble running 4 10TB plus drives ( I did this before the SSDs).

It works and has good speed, but had it for about a week and already the fan is going bad, making a clunking noise and barely spinning.

Every time I boot up the bay I have to worry if I lose a drive and then spend time recovering it. Not dependable.