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archer75

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 26, 2005
3,116
1,747
Oregon
I'm looking for a thunderbolt 3/USB-C drive enclosure of some sort to use with a new 2018 mac mini.
I have 4x 4tb 3.5" hard drives and i'd like to put them in a RAID 5. I'll primarily use this drive for photo work with lightroom. Photos are also backed up online and I periodically back them up to another drive that I keep elsewhere.

I was looking at OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad Raid edition or Akitio Thunder 3 Quad X(but looks like I have to purchase software to raid this?) Or a Drobo 5C. Any thoughts on these or additional recommendations? I'd like to keep the cost for the enclosure under $350.
 
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Then you're looking at something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YFHEAC/

I've had one of these units, and they perform fairly well, but only max out in transfer rate at 250MB/sec.
 
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If you can get slightly larger drives, software raid1 pairs can then be combined into either a raid0 stripe or jbod (aka concatenated).

No special hardware required. If you go the jbod route, you can expand the total size non-destructively.
 
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