MP 1,1-5,1 OWC drive dock (USB-C) opinions?

[macstatic]

I've been using a 4-bay removable hard drive enclosure (JBOD -"Just a bunch of drives") with Firewire 800 for years which has worked very well for making backups. Unfortunately it's limited to 3TB (or was it 4TB?) which is a little small these days:

(image: courtesy of B&H Photo and video)


......... so I'm considering getting an OWC USB-C dual 2.5"/3.5" drive dock instead:

(image: courtesy of OWC)

Since I now have a Sonnet USB-C 3.2 PCIe card installed this should work fine with my cMP 5,1 and I assume it'll take all current large drives (12TB etc.) as well as older, smaller ones too. Unlike my current 4-bay enclosure I won't need to fasten my drives to compatible sleds and it also takes 2.5" drives!
I found a couple of reviews here and here, and it appears to be a solidly built and quiet (I believe I read it doesn't have (or needs) any built-in fan). But I would like to hear from other Mac users who have used it.
A couple of questions:

1) does it take any type (size/brand) 3.5" and 2.5" hard drive?
2) Is it actually correct that you can hot-swap drives with it? Don't you have to eject them first from the Finder desktop?

Are there any other drive docks (for 2 drives) apart from this one that are worth looking into for Mac users?

 

[ThatsMrsGeek2U]

Such a well written question, bummer that there was no feedback. I have the same question, what did you end up doing?

 

[macstatic]

Thank you
So far I've just put the project on hold and am continuing to use several "small" (1-3TB ... funny how the definition of small becomes bigger and bigger) hard drives with my 4-bay 19" rack. Less physical drives, but with each drive handling more data would be nice, and I believe USB 3.1 geb.2 is faster than Firewire 800.
The rack is nice to have though, as it's space saving, but all I can find (from OWC at least) is their Mercury rack Pro with a mini-SAS connector (no USB or Firewire connetcor at all), and a quite steep price tag. I believe I've seen the same rack somewhere else (they're probably all made by the same Chinese company, only labelled differently) a few years back, but not sure if they've been updated with USB 3, and the price for rack units is still quite high.
And since I don't really need 4 bays (2 bays are very handy though) I think that's a premium which I'm not willing to pay just to save some space. I might just place the USB drive dock on top of the Mac Pro (which is also a good idea given the short (1m?) cable limitation of a USB 3.1 gen.2 cable).

I contacted OWC to ask more about the USB drive dock and was told:

The USB-C Dual Bay solution should be able to handle up to 18TB+ drives.

I don't know if 18 TB is a limitation, or if that's the largest possible drives available today, but it appears there's no general limitation. I do wish they had checked this more thoroughly though as there is probably a limit somewhere, but despite asking again I didn't get any more detailed response. The specs say it uses the Via Labs VL820 (USB 3.1) and ASMedia ASM1351 (SATA) chipsets, so we should probably find out more about them which can possibly answer that question. Note: I had a quick read of those pages but found no mention of drive capacity limitations. Maybe someone else with more thorough technical knowledge can make more sense of it?

I was also told (and it says the same in small lettering at the bottom of the product page) of the following drive limitations:

Device may encounter wake from sleep issues on Mac operating systems when using any of the following drives sold by OWC: TOSDT01ACA100, TOSDT01ACA200, TOSDT01ACA300.

Other than that I don't know much more.
But I did find a review at the Mac Performance Guide site which looks quite promising. Other than that ..... nothing. I'm surprised if nobody here has one as they appear quite practical for backup purposes.