Akitio Thunder2 Quad (Enclosure) : Thunderbolt 2

** Update 7/22/18 **This unit is still plugging away a couple of years later without a hiccup.Another useful hint: I went through a period of trying to minimize the ambient noise and chatter in my office as I have a ton of computers and drives going.Part of that was swapping out the stock fan for a Noctua, which works flawlessly.Second: Purchase a piece of thin sorbothane or use some 3M 2552 and cut 4 small squares. In the back of the unit wedge one small piece into each corner of the unit. Make sure it’s not too thin to come loose and get sucked into the fan! It it’s too thin cut another four squares and wedge two together. It should be a tight fit. Cut the disk chatter down by more than half!** Update 1/26/16 **Still Going Strong, Plus New Discoveries:Still going strong after almost a year. I wanted to update based on two findings: 1. I believe this is the identical board to the OWC, at least the sata backplane is identical. 2. They are hack friendly.1. After pulling this apart to determine whether I could hack together a larger DAS from one unit, I noticed the board was labeled by OWC. After looking into it further I found the OWC version of this unit is identical, with the only difference being 1. the IEC Power plug versus the brick power supply in the akitio and 2. the lock mechanism on the owc is replaced with an akitio "badge". So, you can consider this a clone of the OWC for $50 less. I never understood the use of a lock, as if someone wanted to steal the disks and data they'd just walk off with the whole unit- it even has a handle! The power cord would have been nice, as I like to reduce clutter, but really at the end of the day I don't care- the unit sits on my desk 98% of the time. If the lock and the IEC power cord are worth it to you, spend the extra on the OWC. It not, save the cash and get the Akitio.2. ** See Photos for Pictures ** So, after noticing these are port multiplier aware in system info, I started thinking: If I'm using 7200rpm disks, I could use port multipliers and connect 20 spinning disks to one thunderbolt 2 port and still probably not saturate it unless I'm striping. That would provide a really appealing low cost software raid solution for hard disks. Obviously there would be depreciating returns on SSDs. Yes, you'd have to put it in a new case but if for example you had a Norco 4220 rack mount or similar, you could have direct attached thunderbolt connectivity for $300 bucks plus the multipliers. The akitio is just a backplane (looks like the same as OWC) attached to a PCI-E 2x 8 slot. That would give you a theoretical bandwith on the PCI-E of 1.6Gbps single direction, 3.2 Gbps bi directional- with overhead a bit is lost. If a 7200rpm disk gives 120 megabytes / sec just for the sake of discussion, you could stripe 12+ of them before saturating the single direction PCI-E lane. Also, you won't be getting full possible sequential throughput at all times- if you are editing 4k video for example, it will take many many many more disks to bottleneck that connection for your workflow. Also, since many won't be striping, perhaps using Raid5 or even JBOD..... well if you're reading you get where i'm going... no sense in multiple units and thunderbolt cords when you won't saturate the thunderbolt 2 connection. Yes, you'll have to get your hands dirty, but if that's your thing, this Akitio is up for the job. I've seen similar successful, cheap hacks for an external GPU using the Akitio Thunder2 PCI-E expansion, and this could be the same great benefit for those with lots of storage and some time to burn.** Original Review **Excellent for OpenZFS on OS X and NAS solutions and those looking for a standalone box to implement a software raid solution.What were my other options? Well, if you want to use thunderbolt it's slim pickings. There's the Promise Technology options, however they all feature on board Raid, which was not what I wanted. Also, I didn't want to pay a premium for the Promise products when I was simply going to disable their on-board raid anyway. I also didn't want to use the 1TB hitachi drives they came with. Moreover, I've found that ZFS is a country mile more reliable than these on board solutions if you know what you are doing. At the time I bought this the OWC options were out there, but they looked unattractive to me and were quite a bit pricier. There were also options from Lacie etc. but I just didn't want to use their drives, period. I wanted 16 TB in a 4 drive imprint, and no one seemed to be offering that.What exactly where my needs? I wanted to use 4TB Western Digital Reds for a backup solution on a Mac Mini server using OpenZFS software Raid Mirrored sets and be able to connect via thunderbolt and be able to daily chain units as needed. Massive speed was not my goal, however I may implement a second unit with SSDs for general work purposes now that I am happy with how the first unit is going. It's also been my experience that unless you're a video editor doing 4k editing you may not really benefit from the promise speeds anyway. I wanted the reliability of a ZFS implementation for years of work data above all. Yes I now I can't saturate the thunderbolt connection, but for me there's a huge benefit to just having a clean, one plug setup at my workstation.Aesthetically I like it. My needs weren't to have a portable unit, so the power brick doesn't bother me. Sure, it would be nice to have an internal power supply, but I imagine the generated heat might be problematic. The handle is nice and all, but I don't utilize it really. The aluminum casing is attractive and it's nice that it isn't covered in branding materials like the OWC offering.In the end, this gave me the ability to customize a solution for my own needs without getting a bunch of excess junk and paying a premium for it. If you are in the same boat, I'd highly recommend this solution. Their price point is for what you get is better than anything else out there. As a side note, I've used a variety of Akitio products, including their Palm Raid, and have been really happy with their build quality. This particular unit has been running 24/7 for months now without a hiccup.As an aside: If you are using a Thunderbolt display, daisy chain the display after the akitio to avoid monitor sleep/wake issues.My only wish was that they had an 8 drive enclosure.

Would not recommend. The box was nice but unit failed to start after 3 months. I purchased $35 single bay enclosures that are working well. Less speed but more reliable.

This thing is built like a tank and is a pleasure to set up. I filled it with 3x Seagate 2Tb drives (ST2000DM001) in RAID 0, and 1x Seagate 6Gb (ST4000DM000) as a backup to the RAID, to which I rsync occasionally. It's attached to my Mac Pro (trash can). I use this disk setup to store the majority of my media, and I edit HD (1080p) video directly off the drive with ease. With this setup I've benchmarked speeds of high 500mbps WRITE and 600mbps+ READ.Note that you do have to set up the RAID configuration in your OS -- there's not an onboard RAID controller. The box provides a home for what is known as a JBOD: Just a Bunch of Disks. I kind of like this because it provides a lot of configuration flexibility.I've been 100% happy with the performance of the setup, but the fan is not quiet at all, despite what Akitio claims. It's the loudest thing in my basement, by far (admittedly the Mac Pro is silent, so anything else seems loud). I wish the fan would sleep with the drives, but it doesn't -- it's always grinding away, so one star off for that. It kind of interferes with my vlogging mic, so I've ordered a replacement fan to see if I can reduce the noise.EDITI have replaced with an aftermarket fan, which has helped with the noise quite a bit. Do a google search for "akitio thunder quad fan replacement" and you'll find my video about the fan replacement. I'm in contact with the vendor that sold me the first replacement and he's got a second that he's looking at that should be much quieter still. Looking forward to that one when he is finished testing.Update======I've added a second one of these to my setup (I thought the first one was having some controller issues, but it turned out to be a bad disk). The second was from a different vendor who installs a quiet fan option. It's quieter, but still makes some noise, of course.Anyway, I've been using with my main Mac setup (used to be Mac Pro, now 2018 MacBook Pro) using MacOS' software RAID, and it's been rock solid. It's just that disks suck. I have had one of my RAID 0 disks get flakey, and you know what that means. So I'm rebuilding the RAID with new WD Blacks. Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note here and say what a pleasure it is to work with this enclosure. I like working with nicely-designed hardware, and this enclosure's physical design is just so impressive (IMO). I'd like (love) to move up to the Thunder3 Quad, but while these enclosures work I feel the need to continue with them.

After a ton of research on my possible options, I thought this would be a cost effective software RAID solution to get me speed and capacity for 4K video editing. I liked the OWC box, but limited supply led me to this Akitio. They are nearly identical boxes in terms of hardware, so if you're looking at the OWC you should consider this one.My issue though is there is NO good software RAID 5 option for Windows, period. Storage Spaces Parity(RAID5) gave me read speeds in the 400s, but write speeds in the 30 range meaning I could only add files over night to stay productive. I tried a false RAID 10 workaround using disk manager and storage spaces, but this froze my system after multiple attempts to transfer files to the drive.If you're an Apple user, it seems SoftRaid solves all of these issues. I will also point out that these issues would be the same with the OWC Thunderbay for a PC user. If you're a PC user looking for fast RAID 5 or 10 for large file editing and transfer, buy a hardware RAID enclosure. IF you're on a mac, you'll be pretty happy with this.

I have a Thunderbay and this, and the Thunderbay is a much better build. The price is right on this unit, but if you have a choice I'd go with the Thunderbay.--UPDATE:After about 6 months of use, this thing rumbles like crazy. It sits next to my Thunderbay which has been whisper quiet for over a year. Spend the extra 50, you won't regret it.