Name: 0TB OWC ThunderBay 8 Eight-Bay External Drive Enclosure with Dual Thunderbolt 3 Ports
Brand: OWC
SKU: OWCTB38JBKIT0
Price: 1439.99 AUD
Availability: InStock

Excellent reliability and build quality that you can actually trust.

I ordered the 0TB Thunderbay 8 (enclosure only), to replace a previous USB 3.1 based 5 bay enclosure from a different brand, after that previous enclosure started to have reliability issues. So far, the experience has been excellent.

For some background, I am using the Thunderbay 8 attached via Thunderbolt 3 to an Intel NUC10I5FNK, running Debian Linux 11.6, kernel 5.10.0-21-amd64. The drives are 6 Western Digital Red Pros/Ultrastar DC drives, formatted with BTRFS RAID 1. The system acts as an always-on server and NAS, constantly downloading and serving files from the drives.

Even though this isn't really an intended usecase for the Thunderbay 8, the experience has been flawless. The Thunderbay 8 has excellent built quality, with great airflow and thermals, quiet operation, and a very robust chipset and hardware implementation. There has been zero issues with running it indefinitely.

My first impressions were of the packaging and build quality. The Thunderbay is excellently packaged, and comes with all the cables required for easy setup. It also comes with a really nice dust cover/storage bag which makes removing it from the packaging easy.

The unit is solidly built and very clean looking, based around an extruded aluminium casing. Inserting the drive caddies feels really smooth and nice, with good positive feedback once the drives are connected. The built quality is very premium and is a massive step up from other similarly featured (but cheaper) enclosures, and you can really tell that everything has been considered and well thought out.

Operating the Thunderbay 8 is also excellent, as expected. The included fan is very quiet, barely audible over the noise of the spinning drives. If you were running with SSDs however, the fan is very easy to swap out, so a Noctua could be swapped in for an even quieter experience. It's just two screws to remove and the panel hinges back, allowing the fan to be swapped without disassembling anything further. This is a massive improvement over most cheaper enclosures, which require full disassembly to swap out a bad fan. Ask me how I know...

Most importantly of all, the Thunderbay 8 has a solid, trustworthy chipset, based on Thunderbolt 3. It exposes two JMicron JMB585 SATA controllers natively over PCI Express. These are common, well tested SATA controllers used in many other systems. They have rock solid Linux drivers and appear as native PCI Express attached devices. It's basically the same experience as having the drives attached directly to the motherboard, which is really important when you want rock solid reliability. Bulk read speeds are well over 1000MB/s.

This has proven to be a massive upgrade over my previous USB 3.1 based drive enclosure, which instead exposed the drives as UAS devices using a chain of internal USB 3.1 hubs to individual USB 3.1 to SATA controllers. These always had intermittent issues, such as drives disappearing, dropping commands, and random bugs in USB 3.1 Link Power Management. The PCIe controllers are infinitely better.

Overall, I very much recommend the Thunderbay 8. It's definitely expensive, but what you get is absolutely rock solid, with an actual warranty to back it up as well. When you consider the cost of the drives themselves, and the value of the data on them, I think that it's absolutely worth investing in an enclosure that has been well designed for professional use, and will continue to "just work" flawlessly. I would absolutely purchase it again.

Performance Package

OWC quality and build is fantastic - quiet fans and overall small footprint given 8-drives.

RAID-5 with 4TB HDD is able to hit 1G Writes and more in Reads

Great product

Bought and Shipped right away. The product works as expected I will definitely be buying more for my videos editing setup OWC make awesome products totally worth the money

A very good unit

Well built. Seems to work well. It would be great if it had a Thunderbolt hub (providing other ports) built in, but NVM.
Unfortunately, my computer’s Thunderbolt port failed, so I had to return the unit, using Macfixit’s 30-day return policy.
I would buy it again when I get another computer.

Nice - Except the badly designed plug / connection and Communication

Ok - So I aim for an honest review.
First things first, I'm a new user of the OWC. Not a new PC user / builder or tech. Have been building systems since the early 1990s. The concept of error checking drives before you use them is great, except it died when we did it with 4 x 18Tb Seagate Iron Wolf Pros onboard. These aren't the cheap units they are certified for the job. Having said that we got a failure on one drive when we certified it, we ended up sending the drive back, then another failure for the same reason. This was when we selected all the drives to certify together. When done one by one they passed. I rang Macfixit to have a chat about it and was told I would be called back ? Nope no call back. Then an email said I would be called back, nope still no call back.
I ended up asking for assistance on the online chat / forums, where we found similar issues. Now we thought we found the issue when we discovered the Thunderbolt cable was loose and I mean it just kept falling out, to such a point that we ended up taping it in place - these are a really bad design, and yes its the OWC cable that came with it and we did try others, seems the onboard plug is "sloppy" in any case we ordered the rubbery / plastic cable holder from OWC and that seems to work ok, still not what you expect from the cost of such a unit, nor is it very professional. Once we had the unit up and going - several days late, it seems to work really well. We have 2 x 18Tb set to Mirror and those copy to the other 2 x 18 Tb mirrored (36Tb to 36Tb) essentially.
These then copy once a month to an Exos HDD which goes into a fireproof safe. And as a testing against this unit it all goes to a Lacie 6 Big Raid as well.
We are watching all of these for failures and issues. These units hold over 400 thousand Photos, and growing, so we need to keep them stored in a few places. They would score 1 extra point if we had have received any of the calls back that we were promised. Perhaps even another if the documentation was better at communicating the ins and outs AND a VERY BIG AND the cable connection on the actual unit wasn't so shitty. So a Solid 3 heading to a 4.
But it was the people that let that 1 point go and the quality of the cable joint that really killed the other.
Would I still buy another one - Yes, but only with a cable support and the full knowledge of the time it takes to certify each disk 9 up to 6 days each, depending on size.) We would need to allow a hell of a lead time for the project, which, if time is important, could be a killer.
Now some months later it seems to be running fine and I will say OWC support was helpful over email, although we never saw the results of our emailed .zip file diagnostic? And - hey Macfixit, still no call back ??
The certification of several drives at once needs to be reliable, perhaps more robust? Let us know if this gets solved.

Regards.

0TB OWC ThunderBay 8 Eight-Bay External Drive Enclosure with Dual Thunderbolt 3 Ports

OWC

ThunderBay 8
Eight-Bay Thunderbolt 3 External Drive Enclosure

Product Specifications

Notes

Manufacturer Information

Manufacturer P/N

UPC / EAN

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