Thunderbolt 3 8-bay DAS

[lukasz74nj]

I'm looking for a Thunderbolt 3 DAS with at least 8 SATA drive bays. I came across OWC's ThunderBay 8 which seems to provide what I need, although there aren't many reviews. Do you have any opinion on this DAS? Would it be cheaper to build something like that from scratch? I'm not looking for a NAS solution but DAS over Thunderbolt 3. I'd prefer to build the unit myself but don't know where to begin.

 

[Outrigger]

Haven't had experience with the OWC but I have been using the Lacie's 6 bay via TB3 and its been working flawlessly for 2 1/2 yrs. They an 8 bay version as well. It runs fast and quiet and has 2 TB3 ports for daisy chain.

 

[ght56]

Are you looking to to use these as JBOD or RAID? The thing that pops out to me is that it is a pretty expensive enclosure for one that only does software RAID. How are you planning to use the system?

 

[lukasz74nj]

Haven't had experience with the OWC but I have been using the Lacie's 6 bay via TB3 and its been working flawlessly for 2 1/2 yrs. They an 8 bay version as well. It runs fast and quiet and has 2 TB3 ports for daisy chain.

I see that they have 6 and 12-bay versions but don't offer empty enclosures, which is what want. The 12-bay model is very expensive.

 

[lukasz74nj]

Are you looking to to use these as JBOD or RAID? The thing that pops out to me is that it is a pretty expensive enclosure for one that only does software RAID. How are you planning to use the system?

I want to be able to use Apple RAID. I neither want to use OWC's SoftRAID (because it is not free and T2 chip in Mac has to be disabled) or any proprietary hardware RAID. OWC enclosure exposes all drives to the OS so it is possible to use Apple RAID. But I would really prefer to build my own DAS from scratch but nowhere I can find any info online (the only information I found was about NAS).