OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 External Raid Storage Enclosure with 3Port HUB for Mac and PC

Everything about this OWC device is top notch. It has a fan to move air over the 2 drives you add. It will take 3.5" old style hard drives or 2.5" SSD's, but not M.2 drives. It's quiet, fast moving data, has a hardware raid that allows for RAID 1 or RAID 2.

Initial rating of five stars after a few hours use; I'll revise the rating if I run into issues over time.First off, the fan on this unit is very quiet. The noise, as some others have mentioned, is down to the hard drives themselves. If you're using SSDs this would be extremely quiet, if using traditional spinning drives it will depend on the drives. With some older Toshiba drives inside the noise is very low; with some recently-purchased WD Black drives (which make a lot more noise when seeking, and give a "thunk" sound every now and again) it's loud enough to be annoying.I've got a dual-drive Thunderbolt enclosure from OWC as well, and used BlackMagic Speed Test to test write and read speeds for a RAID-0 setup using the traditional hard drives mentioned above. The results are within 3% for both reads and writes. This means the hard drives themselves are the limiting factor, and both USB 3.1 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt are capable of extracting maximum performance from them. As the Thunderbolt version of this enclosure is significantly more expensive, I can't see any reason to purchase it unless you're using SSDs (and even then, as both enclosures rely on SATA interfaces for the drives, you'll want to check the drives' SATA specs to see if Thunderbolt would be faster even with SSDs.)

Does what it's meant to do no complaints. The RAID was easy to set up and drives easy to install. Should be a nice setup for a while. Nothing blew me away about this drive enclosure is the only reason it's not five stars.

This unit powers down the drives after inactivity, even when the Mac power settings are set to not power down the drives. Once they power down, the only way to get them to wake is unplug the power and recycle the unit. This is a common problem for Mac users and for over a year, there has been no fix or even comment in any of the "please help" threads from OWC. I wish I had researched this more before purchasing. Zero stars if I could. Back to Amazon it goes.

Yes this is absolutely loud. It was so loud I returned the first one. But then decided to give it another shot with some adjustments. So I reordered another one. The good news about that is that returns are very easy.After the first experience I went ahead and just bought a new PC case instead and put the 2 hard drives inside my computer. But that didn't take long to fill those with movies and I wanted some external backups. This OWC unit is beautiful and impressive, so I thought I'd give it another chance. From reading reviews all the other brands had loud fans, and were made of plastic. And cramped. So they would overheat often. I liked the look of this OWC product and it is all aluminum so it transfers heat well. And there is plenty of space for the drives the breath. The front is wide open mesh for great venting. Heat will kill your drives fast, you really don't want to risk it with those other units. I'll deal with some extra sound as long as my drives are safer from heat. And this unit seems to really keep them cool. So big props for that.The small fan runs very slow but is affective and quiet. However, this is the big problem. All that aluminum is very loud for transferring noise. And you have a big open front. It's acts like a big hollow open megaphone that amplifies every single tick and clunk of the hard drives. The drives sit directly on metal. Which helps for heat but is horrible for sound. The sounds moves right through the case. And then echo's and is amped up by the design. There are no rubber washers or anything. It's all metal on metal.So here is what I did to alleviate the problem. First off it's way worse in RAID, so I just used JBOD. One drive at a time is quieter. That is fine for me, better for back up anyway. Less risk. I also bought some thin thermal pads for the drives to sit on to absorb some of the sound, but they will also transfer heat still to the aluminum body. This helped enough to make it bearable. Oh it's still quite loud, but it helped. it's a little tight but the pads do fit under them if you apply a little pressure.And for anyone wondering. I had originally had my drives sitting bare on the top of my desk with a USB adapter, and they were not loud at all, pretty quiet actually. Didn't bother me one bit. So yeah this unit amps the sound up big time. Best to keep it hidden some place if you can. Right now I'm transferring all of my data and I hear constant loud CLUNK CLICK CLICK CLUNK CLICK CLUNK. Keep in mind I have a very quiet PC with expensive large slow moving fans. So all I mostly hear are these hard drives. The same original drives I put in my case I can hear but not even half as loud as when the drives are in the OWC.Overall though, this thing is beautiful, it's a little on the big side but that is good for airflow. It feels top notch quality, it'll save your hard drives from heat death, which will also help them perform better, drives tend to slow down when they get too hot. It looks beautiful. I've been transferring data for hours and it doesn't even feel warm to the touch. Just mildly over room temperature. I feel like for the size though that the power supply should be built in, but it's really not that big of a deal to have a small power brick on the floor.It comes with two different USB cables. I think it should come with a small plastic tool to change the RAID mode. Luckily I had and dug one of my tiny flat screw drivers out from my toolbox.Also who the heck uses these for SSDs?? There are duel raid units that are super tiny for SSDs and only cost 50 bucks. Don't buy these huge things for SSD drives.Update: You know what is really annoying about this Enclosure? After the hard drives spin up it takes an additional 15 seconds before Windows can use it. If they spin down and then back up again it takes an additional 15 seconds on top of the spin up/down cycle. Way too much hang time.Also in JBOD mode if you're using one drive and the other is spun down, and the other drive then spins up, each time the other drive spins up ALL DATA STOPS. Your transfer will go to zero until the other drive spins up. And then it has that horrible extra 15 second delay on top of it before your data transfer resumes again for the drive you've been using already. So your drive is down for some time. If you're watching a movie the movie will stop playing for quite some time and freeze until the other drive is done spinning up. Ugh this thing is frustrating. Guess I'm going to have to actually use RAID then so both drives will be on or off at the same time and never spin up or down independently.Another update: Switched to Raid0 again. There is always a 15 second delay and hang time after the drives have spun up. It just sits there and I have to wait. After every computer reboot too I have to wait for my computer to start as it hangs waiting for the OWC hub. That is the extra time AFTER the hard drives have spun up. My internal drives do not do this and none of my other external drives have ever done this, very frustrating. I would definitely not buy this product again.Last update. Returned this OWC, and bought the Sabrent 5 bay instead. I'm very happy with that one and will be keeping that one. I wish I had just bought that other brand in the first place and saved all this hassle with the OWC.

Discover the power of our USB 3.2 Version 2 enclosure! While it may not boast the thunderous speed of Thunderbolt 4, it's a high-performance solution in its own right. With a blazing 10Gbps rating, it's perfect for those seeking swift data transfers without breaking the bank.Equipped with cables from OWC and paired with two Seagate Ironwolf HDDs, this enclosure delivers impressive read and write speeds of 250-270Mbps. And when connected with a Thunderbolt 3 cable, it soars to an astonishing 490-530Mbps! Surpassing even the performance of Samsung T5 SSD drives, it's a true powerhouse for your storage needs. Experience speed and reliability like never before with our USB 3.2 enclosure.

It’s a little noisy. I plan on replacing the drives to SSD.

Somehow right after we purchased this it went from $1,700 to $900. The drive was purchased for film editing and has not proven effective. Premiere project freezes up and proxy footage fails to load. Very disappointing product though there are few option for large amounts of footage.