My review of the Mobius 5-bay Enclosure (with thoughts on RAID & drive choice)

Hey all fellow nMP owners... I purchased an Oyen Digital Mobius for my Mac Mini but tested it pretty thoroughly on my nMP when I first got it. I posted the full review in the Peripherals Forum but I thought I would mention it here since I know this might be of interest to nMP owners...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1765375/

If you just want the conclusion/summary, here it is...

Conclusion

The Mobius is not completely flawless, but it is the best solution I'm aware of that meets my requirements.
- It's very reasonably priced (at $229 USD)
- It offers plenty of storage options with 5-bays
- It's nicely designed and integrates well with either the nMP or my HTPC setup.
- It's not obnoxiously loud.
- It's been operating 24/7 without a hiccup now for a couple of weeks.
- Oyen Digital support was responsive and knowledgeable (and based in the US)
- It's performance is certainly adequate for HTPC, Backup, or NAS type duties (using Disk Utility to setup the RAID0 array)

Would I recommend it to others?

Yes... if you need a flexible large volume storage solution for your media, backups, or NAS duties. But I would probably not recommend this for storage that was involved in your project workflow. It's performance in RAID0 is not much better than a single drive. Instead, I'd definitely recommend folks get as much SSD storage as possible for project work (I have 1TB on my nMP for my current Aperture library), and then when you've exhausted that look at Thunderbolt drive enclosures like the Oyen Digital DataTale, Promise Pegasus or the WD Velociraptor Duo (which I have and am very pleased with for archiving Aperture Libraries). And if you don't want to pay for Thunderbolt, even a couple of large USB3 externals each directly connected via USB3 will offer better performance in SW RAID0 than this enclosure.

ssls6 said:

Do the drives sleep when inactive?

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Well, the whole enclosure will spin down the drives and sleep after 20min of inactivity with the latest firmware (in JBOD mode - and I believe any HW RAID mode as well but I didn't use it in any HW RAID mode for long). However the 2-19 firmware will disable sleep (at least in JBOD mode). There's a setting in the RAID management tool to control the time to sleep when operating in any HW RAID mode but I didn't try that out.

The bottom line is that I believe you can have sleep enabled if you want and disabled if you don't.

Einz said:

When your Mac sleeps the drives sleep too, but the fan in the case still runs. Which is kind of odd .

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Hmmm, I'm pretty sure when mine went to sleep, everything was powering down. That was with the newer firmware ( not the older one I'm running now). There are at least a couple of different firmware so out there with different sleep characteristics.

Einz said:

I was still using the firmware from Jan.

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You may want to try the more current Firmware but I would ask them for a link to the one you have now just in case you want to revert back. You can just call them up and chat with their support engineers which is a really nice benefit these days!

Here's the two firmware releases I was playing with...
5-12 (sleep in JBOD): http://oyendigital.com/mobius-051214
2-19 (no sleep in JBOD): http://oyendigital.com/mobius-021914

Mac RAID Utility and Firmware update tool:
http://oyendigital.com/tech/firmware/Mac_v0.09.58_RAID_Manager.zip

zain8500 said:

Have you changed the drive?

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Sorry, Not sure who or what you're asking

My review of the Mobius 5-bay Enclosure (with thoughts on RAID & drive choice)

Einz said:

Thanks, I don't use that case anymore. I have switched to a OWC TB enclosure. But, will keep it as a backup.

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Hmm... Interesting. The OWC Thunderbay IV/4?! I've been thinking lately that the Thunderbay might be a better choice... I'm very interested in your thoughts on it and how it compares to the Mobius.

Einz said:

Yes, it's the IV with the TB2 chip.



It's faster. It's about as quiet s the Mobius. It's bootable. I never got around to boot from the Mobius.



The TB2 chip in OWC is not as fast as the Pegasus. The single SSD maxed at about 380mb read (just a little bit faster than the USB connection on the nMP). The Pegasus is 400+. I don't remembered the exact number. But, then the OWC is cheaper.



It's worth the $300+ over the Mobius. When I got my nMP last December. There were not many options back them. The Mobius severed me well for the past 7 months.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm also looking at the Thunderbay IV with TB1 since it's a bit more affordable and I'm using it with large spinning disks connected to a Mini with a TB1 port.

How does the Thunderbay sleep? If my Mini is on 24/7 will it keep the disks spinning 24/7 also? I don't want to deal with waking it from sleep all the time.

Thanks.