OWC ThunderBay 6 RAID Ready 6-Bay External Storage Enclosure with Dual Thunderbolt 3 Ports, Featuring SoftRAID XT, Thunderbolt 3 Cable Included, (OWCTB36SRKIT0)

Works as it should, set up in a snap.... extra space, various configurations...You can even strip RAID sets across multipule expansion units!! WOW, redundant power, backplane, and drives!The SSD M.2 slot works perfect! SUPER fast M.2 disk shows as volume on my MAC. - FAST

Unfortunately I had a very disappointing experience with this enclosure and OWC. It would often disconnect and reconnect to the host for a brief moment. Sometimes while in use sometimes while sitting idle. The thunderbolt 3 cable it came with started to shed its insulation after a few months. So I bought a apple thunderbolt 3 cable and that helped with the random disconnects. But it was still very sensitive to anything touching the cable. One little brush again the thunderbolt 3 connection and it would disconnect and reconnect corrupting and data transfer that was taking place. But I could work around that as it was a stationary setup and I could shut it down if anything needed to be moved. When it wasn’t disconnecting and corrupting data it worked well.Then 10 months after purchase it died entirely, wouldn’t wake up or communicate. I contacted support. They asked me to update the units firmware, not possible when the unit isn’t detected at all by the host. Then they wanted to send me a new cable to try even though I told them I already tested multiple thunderbolt 3 cables. They sent it and of course the unit was still dead. After a few weeks of back and forth they finally agreed to setup an rma. One and a half weeks after shipping I reached out to find the status of the rma. I was informed that they would not be honoring the warranty as some rust had formed on the enclosure. I live near the ocean so the air does have a high salt content. I work as a photographer and have a great number of electronic devices operating in the same room the the thunderbay was in. They have all been running for years in this environment. Multiple computers, monitors, cameras. 4K tv, home theater receiver, every current game console system. The hard drives that were used in the bay have been operating in this room for much longer than the bay was. These other devices don’t show rust on their bare metal as they are made of higher quality materials than this thunder bay.They just want an excuse to not honor the warranty. Basically I’m not entitled to warranty coverage because of where I live. I am very disappointed in this product and OWC as a company. I will not be purchasing their products in the future. Buyer beware.

Very fast, lots or storage space, and a bonus M2 slot make this a great addition to a home/small business compute setup. Have it connected to a Mac Mini with SoftRaid and it’s been fantastic.

This looks like a decent product at first, but there are couple major deal breakers:* APFS was introduced in 2017 and given this is a product oriented at macOS users, you might assume APFS support is given, but you'd be very wrong. When I enquired about it, OWC support told me SoftRAID 6 with APFS support is in the works, but it has been reported to be in the works on various forums since 2017 and ETA is still unclear.* Upgrade to SoftRAID 6 will be a paid upgrade (expect around $100 for single license, but again, no official confirmation). And that is even if you buy the product right now, at a point in time where OWC themselves admit SoftRAID 5 is not really up to the task and also seems to have some major problems with upcoming macOS Catalina. 🤯(As a side note, this is an amazing way to Osborne your products - @OWC why on Earth would you not make the upgrades included? This is just silly.)* One SoftRAID license gets you access to your $4k storage from *one* Mac. You can install it on multiple Macs, but it will only work on one unless you log out your user on the 2nd Mac. So if you plan to use the storage between multiple Macs, be ready to pay for two licenses and then for two ~$100 upgrades later. Again @OWC, is it really necessary to nickel-and-dime your customers like that?(SoftRAID 6 may or may not resolve this issue, supposedly a better system is in the works, but again, no guarantees).In overall, this would be a great product if OWC had given a bit more thought to their product management or at least guaranteed free upgrades to SoftRAID licenses purchased now. The fact none of the above issues are clearly mentioned anywhere does leave a bit of a sour after tase and will make me probably avoid OWC for a while.As it is, this product is useless for my use case and I hope I'll be able to return it. Your mileage may vary.Update: Forgot to mention that SoftRAID 5 also doesn't support RAID 6 (2 disk redundancy) which is usually the standard for professional 6 bay arrays. Again, this is something that SoftRAID 6 should supposedly address when/if it's released.