Excellent HD Enclosure! Fast setup and is working flawlessly. It’s great that it supports both HD and SSD drives, Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1!

I’m using it with a 2017 iMac 5K. I installed one 2 TB drive for Time Machine backup and two 2TB HD’s that I keep all my photography images on to use with Lightroom & Photoshop. These are my working drives and the Thunderbolt 3 speed is doing very well. There is a slight lag when I first access a drive of about 2-3 sec. after that it’s as smooth as silk. I’m able to edit large images with no lag, all sliders are smooth in all the software I use. I use a Nikon D810 that creates 36.3 MP files. Sometimes making HRD & Panoramic images I combine up to 5 of these. This creates a HUGE file and there is still very little lag if any at all.

I’m planning on replacing the HD’s with SSD’s in the future. This enclosure will be screaming fast after that is done.

I’ve read complaints about fan noise and don’t totally agree. If it was on my desk attached with the very short cable that’s included, it might be a little loud. I purchased a 6 foot certified Thunderbolt 3 cable. My enclosure sits about 3’-4’ from me on a cart and I barely hear it at all. In fact, when processing very large files the internal fan of my iMac is much louder.

This enclosure is a winner in my book!

My Mac Pro tower would not update beyond El Capitan and I wanted to move up to High Sierra and have a partition with OS Mojave. I have an iMac (5K) 27" but of course iMacs only have room for one disk, hence the enclosure. I had an SSD for the boot drive on the Mac Pro and four 1TB drives. I consolidated some of the data and plugged in a 4TB drive for backups and a 2TB drive for handling my current data. Then I added two 1TB drives and partitioned them to have a spare High Sierra partition and a Mojave partition. This box made everything very easy.

I had seen some posts about the enclosure fan being very noisy and in my case I have no noticeable fan noise at all. So far I am very happy.

It's not a problem but be aware that the enclosure will not power up unless the computer is on and the Thunderbolt 3 cable is plugged into the computer and the enclosure is powered on. The big plus is that you only need to power on the enclosure once because the computer will power down the drives and the fan automatically when it is powered down. The front panel light will switch to orange when that happens. When the computer is switched back on the drive enclosure powers up automatically. I like that feature. I leave the fan off switch in the "on" position at all times.

I like that the enclosure looks like a miniature version of the Mac Pro tower. I like the spring-loaded drive screws. It's also very easy to remove the front panel which attaches magnetically. A nice touch.

Speed is very good over the T3 port although the drives are the limiting factor. I am using the enclosure in JBOD mode. I am sure that the speed of the connection would be much better if drives were configured as RAID 0. There is an extra T3 port on the enclosure which can support a monitor or a flash drive. I attached a 1TB flash drive and attached my second monitor to a spare T3 port on the computer which has two T3 ports.

All in all I am very pleased. Most of the other enclosures are made of plastic and are not rated as highly.

First things first: I was scared about the noise coming from this because of the reviews that complained of how loud the fan is. I'm sorry, but this is far from noisy. I currently have this sitting on my desktop right next to my iMac and yes, I can hear some slight fan noise, but it's not a decibel induced headache like some have claimed. Once I get my longer Thunderbolt3 cable in, I'll move it off to the side for less noise. Second, if you're going to complain about speeds, than you should be sure that it's not your setup that is the problem. I eventually want to go SSD, but for now I went with a 4 drive Raid0 configuration and the speeds are spot on. I have moved my entire video editing and photo editing library to the drive with zero issues. I went with a Raid0 configuration because I pay for a backup service that does in fact back up USB and Thunderbolt connected drives. In addition, Raid0 provides the best speeds. The enclose is well constructed and appears to be very sturdy. Time will tell how it stands up, but the enclosure is straight forward. I'm taking one star off for the annoying stickers pasted on the enclosure that are not easily removed.

My goal in purchasing the Thunder3 Quad X was to replace the starting-to-slow down (and maybe failing) internal fusion drive on my Late 2013 iMac with a 4 TB SSD boot drive. As well, I wanted to ditch a bevvy of slow USB 2.0 external drives that I've been using for storing video and audio media, and speed up my USB 2.0 Time Machine backup.

My goal is to add a year of life to my current iMac. I'm tempted by the current 27" 5K iMac, but figure mac is overdue for a major overhaul, and next year's will be an even bigger improvement. This enclosure made so much more sense to me than, say an internal SSD upgrade, since, when I'm ready, I can migrate everything to my next generation. The enclosure cost is less than the labor cost of an internal drive upgrade which would have to stay with the old system.

Note that my old iMac supports only Thunderbolt 1, which is 10 GB/s, not the 40 GB/s of 3. To make it work, I needed to purchase a Thunderbolt 2 cable (same connector as T1) and the Apple Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter (the T3 cable that comes with the enclosure is useless for this purpose). Warning, I discovered it IS POSSIBLE TO PLUG IN A THUNDERBOLT 2 CABLE REVERSED INTO THE BACK OF MY iMAC... it was a little snug going in the wrong way, but I didn't "force it". Still, the cable didn't work in that orientation, and I despaired about getting the system running until I decided to see if I could reverse it. Going in the "right" way was still snug, though not quite as snug, but the system connected instantly.

So far I'm very pleased with the change. The system suspends power in the enclosure when I shut down, and restarts automatically when I turn on my iMac. So far, it's been completely reliable. The fan is quiet, though it would be slightly audible if it were on my desk. I just bought a 2m cable and installed it on the floor under my desk. I certainly can't hear the fan now.

I haven't yet replaced my Time Machine disk, as I'm saving up my money to buy a 12TB drive. However, as an experiment, I did install a 3TB SATA drive I had surplus. It was a snap to install (just had to reformat it, which took only a couple of minutes), and it's works great.

The new SSD boot drive is working fine. It's not wildly faster on initial boot up: saving about 20 seconds (55 seconds vs. 1:15 or so). Still, the OS on a fusion drive is supposed to be on an SSD anyway, but I'm pleased there's some savings v the internal drive.

Where I really notice a difference is in application performance and changing contexts. Apps definitely open up more quickly than they used to, and switching windows is snappy.

I needed something strong and robust for local and internal travel. I offload 4-8K raw footage daily and edit on Final Cut Pro X. My main reader is the Panasonic AU-XPD3 with can offload at full 10 Gb/s on a 512 Gb Express P2 card from the Varicam raw cams. I daisy chained 3-4 devices and no issues so far. Works well with my other NVRAM m.2 enclosure that's has a 2,800 MB/s sustained read & write! m.2 is a must have when doing high bit rate raw video footage otherwise you'll be waking up all night just to finish offloading. This enclosure is just like a Mac Pro 5.1 but in a small form factor that you can carry vs a 40 lbs Mac Pro 5.1. I picked this over the competition because of the carry handle. It also comes with a black bag for easy transport if you were to carry it as a stand alone. Very decent quality build. Has a nice metal feeling. Easy to install hdd, and remove. Only tool needed is a small Phillips screw for the hdds. The hdd tray itself looks has a similar toolless screw found on the Mac Pro that can be easily removed and swapped. This is very flexible. Worked fine on MBP 2015 via TB3-2 adaptor and native TB3. 20 Gb/s on TB2 is plenty for four 16 Gb Seagate Iron Wolf hdds formatted as RAID 5 via SoftRAID. Max r/w is about 1,000 MB/s. 10 Gb/s will give you about 1,250 MB/s. Only using about 1/4 of TB3's 40 Gb/s bandwidth per 4 hdds enclosure. Big upgrade from USB3 hdds. I hated the annoying 12vdc power cable adaptors, USB3 cables, hub and limitations with more than 12 USB3 concurrent connected drives. TB3 is much more powerful and expandable. All I need with this is a universal power cable, TB3 cable and that's all to it. Greatly simply setup and strike from 12-14 cables with USB3. Worthwhile investment.

Great thunderbolt 3 enclosure. I wanted an enclosure that was empty so that I could put my own drive I already have in it. There weren't many options for thunderbolt 3 but I am glad I got this one. Its well built, easy to use and set up, and it looks great! If you have the iMac Pro, it matches perfectly! I definitely recommend this if you are looking for an external enclosure! I set mine up to have 2 1TB SSD in a Raid 0 and then an 8TB HHD for storing my images and then a 1TB HHD for a bootable backup.

Update: 6/24/19

After using this for over a year now, I would say this is still just as amazing as I had hoped it would be. It works great, doesn't give me any problems, and is very easy to update the drives if you choose to. I have updated my 1TB HHD to a 2TB HHD and it took less than 5 minutes to do. Just had to find my small screw driver to unscrew the drive from the enclosure slot. I will definitely be buying another when I need additional drives! Might get one soon just to be another backup option for the current drives!

So I actually loved this. The enclosure is very nice and unlike others, I didn't find the fan to be nosey at all. I popped it two 5400 and 2 7200 sized drives. The first thing I tested was the 5400 (HGST deskstar if anyone cares) and ran a black magic speed test and the read and write were both around 200. Great!

Then I ran the 7200 and it came in at around 240 Read and write. Awesome!

Then I tested the second 7200 and it only ran at around 160 read/write. That's weird. I figured I had a bad disk so I ran all over town looking for a local replacement disk. Luckily Fry's had exactly the same disks I was looking for so I grabbed it and came home and low and behold, this one had the exact same issue.

Then it dawned on me that perhaps it wasn't the disk but the enclosure so I took the disk out and put it in my bare drive "toaster" docking station and low and behold the disks are just fine. For some reason, the Thunder3 Quad X is suppressing the speeds on the 7200 but on the 5400 sized drives. It makes me wonder why they would do that but frankly I've already wasted an evening on this. It's going back to Amazon tomorrow.

Really disappointing because this seems like such a nice enclosure at first...but if it's already acting weird, I'm not messing around with it. Thank goodness of Amazon's return policy. Just wish I wouldn't have wasted my time.

With all that said, again the fan is NOT loud. The drives can be but it gets better when you get all the drives in (weird, I know. but I think filling up the bays limits the space for echo/reverberation.

I bought this 4 bay enclosure to replace my big desktop system. I have it hooked up to my new Mac mini 2018 edition with a 40GBps cable. I only have the OS on my startup drive and all my other files are linked to this bay. It really helps keep your computer running at top speed and it feels like I am writing and opening files directly to an internal drive. There is a little noise from the fan but I have mine on the shelf below my desk surface so I barely hear it. The enclosure design looks like a baby version of my old Mac Pro Tower. Beautiful design. All aluminum enclosure and it feels solid. The thunderbolt3 cable that comes with the unit is only 18" so it really limits where you can put the enclosure. I wish there was an option to pay a bit more for a longer cord. I have a 6' cable now and the original just sits in a drawer. If you have it hooked up to a laptop the cable will charge your laptop slowly. I definitely recommend this unit if you like to have multiple drives, lots of storage and plenty of room for a back-up. Plus, it's all contained in one clean look unit. The price is a bit higher than other enclosures but you really do get what you pay for.

Works strait out of the box when fitted with drives. One set up as a raid the other as individual drives used for longer term storage. Very useful. Also being able to daisy chain drives is very useful.

I bought this enclosure to use a 4 HDDs software RAID array with a Thunderbolt 3 laptop (HP Spectre x360 with Ubuntu 18.04).

Pros:

- Great performance for RAID 0 (striping = to improve transfer rate) and RAID 1 (mirror = against failure). For instance with RAID 0, I got write sequential transfer rates of 115MB/s with 2 x 2tb Seagate "green" drives from 2011. Read rate for the same array was 185 MB/s with 100MB files. Not tested for RAID 1+0, but my bet is that it would fare well.

- With single drives, the transfer rate with the laptop and the Thunder 3 Quad X was a few percent better than my desktop one, which features an Asus MSA97 R2.0 motherboard.

- The enclosure is all-metal, sturdy (and somehow heavy). It has a high quality feeling.

- Installing HDDs is easy.

- The Thunderbolt ports are able to charge the HP Spectre, even though the laptop charger delivers up to 65W while the Thunder3 Quad X gives 27W.

- Not noisy.

- Excellent e-mail support from Akitio.

Cons:

- Software RAID 5 transfer rates were not sufficient in write mode, although a lot better than what I tested with another enclosure. Exactly, with 4xHDDs and 100MB files: Read = 365MB/s, Write = 4 MB/s. Not recommended. Notice that RAID 5 is not featured on the Akitio site. On my desktop the same test gives R: 330 MB/s (the enclosure wins!) and W: 105 MB/s.

This would normally brings me to remove one star, but the quality of the support given by the company makes me keep it.

Other considerations :

- To be sure it's understood: the enclosure does not provide a RAID controller. You have to use the software RAID feature provided by your OS, Windows / MAC / Linux.

- The overall performance of a RAID array depends on the drives used, for the same algorithm (RAID 0, 1, 5...), the same controllers (in the enclosure) and the same drivers (in the computer). The transfer rate of single HDDs varies a lot between models and generations, even for the same capacity. And the newest are not always the best. When combining drives expect that the weakest will influence the whole array, although the result can be spectacular. The Akitio site shows a 800 MB/s rate for 4 x 10tb Seagate HDDs in a RAID 0 array. I consider this as a best-case scenario.

I have this connected to a 27" iMac and it's been great so far. It is very sturdy and was heavier than I expected.

Pros:

- fan control; can turn them off if not needed

- works fine with ZFS

- works fine with Apple Software RAID; I currently have 4 SSD's in a RAID10 config formatted with HFS+

- blue LED is not super bright and distracting

I don't have any cons with this device yet. Will have to see how the power supply holds up after a couple years.

Very well made unit. Fabulously packed for shipping. I am very pleased with this unit

My only minor complaint is that the power light is so bright, it bleeds into the other four disk lights. Added to the Mac-mini 2018 for external drive and backup drive, works like a charm.