OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2

[wchang]

Hi,

I'm in the market for a raid external hard drive solution. I do not need a NAS external drive. I am a photographer looking to store my photos on a large drive that has raid 5 or 10. I came across the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 and would like your feedback on this unit. Should I go with this setup or something else? I am looking to get the 8TB version setup on eSata with my iMac 27 modded with eSata.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEQX2T8.0S/

Please let me know if this is a good solution to go with or should I go with a different brand and setup?

 

[al2o3cr]

I've got the 4TB model and haven't had any problems with it (only had it a few months). I'm using it via FW800 and it can totally saturate that bus (80+MB/s transfer) so I suspect it might do even better via eSATA.

Some notes:

- I was somewhat shocked by how LARGE the box is. The pictures didn't do the depth justice; it positively dwarfs my other externals. It's also pretty heavy, but an all-metal chassis will do that...

- When operating, it can be a little noisy. Not OWC's fault, but it's (again) a little surprising to go from hearing the mechanical noise of a lone 2.5" HDD inside a laptop to 4x 3.5" HDDs in a well-vented enclosure.

I wouldn't describe either of the above as a "problem", but worth knowing in case you're expecting a tiny, silent, lightweight box that you can toss in your camera bag.

 

[wchang]

Thanks for the info! I appreciate it!

Do you happen to have a picture of your setup? I would like to see it looks like.

 

[al2o3cr]

Thanks for the info! I appreciate it!

Do you happen to have a picture of your setup? I would like to see it looks like.

No pictures, sadly, but it's pretty basic. I've got the Qx2 on the left side with a vanilla 3.5" external (USB) sitting horizontally on top with room to spare. Then a 23" ACD on one of these. Finally the MBP on another stand with an OWC external DVD writer + the ACD power supply underneath.

No particular reason for those stands (although 'Cupertino' + 'Redmond' is pretty funny) other than they were the right height and in stock at the local Microcenter when I got tired of hunching over my desk.

 

[santaliqueur]

I have two of these units. Each is filled with four 2TB drives. One is a mirror of the other. 6TB usable space, with the ability to survive up to 5/8 simultaneous hard drive failures.

The units are a little noisy, so I just put them out of the immediate computing area. Bought a long FireWire cable and power cord from monoprice.

The build quality feels extremely solid, and these units are heavy, especially when populated with drives. I'd recommend them for sure, unless you are *very* sensitive to noise, but they aren't all that loud.

 

[santaliqueur]

I also have the 500GB version of this. Powered by FireWire (no power cable needed), and it's nearly silent. You can get up to 1TB. Great little device, I use it to backup all my photographs and Aperture library with rsync scripts.

 

[Garsun]

I have 3 of these drives, all with 4 2tb drives.
The 1st one I bought has wd green drives(long story) and it runs silent, just fine on my desk. The other 2 have the normal drives in then and are noisy enough to put under the desk(or in the other room).
Thay are all raid 5 on esata. The green drives get 120-150MB/s and the normal ones get 150-180MB/s