Review on 📦 OWC 0GB Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB 3.1 / eSATA RAID Enclosure Kit by Jaime Bustamante

PROS: Really good quality product. Aluminum housing with very well thought-out hard disk mounting and cooling. The fan pulls air in and out and has kept the drives cool so far. I'm using two 4TB WD Red drives in Raid 1. I've experimented with the range and JBOD setting but obviously want the redundancy of RAID 1. Switching between modes is very easy and the drives set up quickly. Hard disk read and write speeds are basically the same as SATA. The bottleneck is clearly the hard drives, not the device. In RAID 1 I measured 181 MB/s reading and 155 MB/s writing. Take it for what you get when you read RAID 1. CONS: The stock fan is incredibly loud and bad. Even under my desk, the whining was very annoying. I replaced the standard fan with a Noctua NF-A6x25 and it's now almost silent apart from drive noise. This device would get 5 stars if it weren't for the standard cash register fan. Overall, this solution with drives and a replacement fan cost me $290 for a 4TB RAID 1 external hard drive. In terms of capacity and redundancy, it's cheaper than anything else on the market. Also, I can replace the hard drives with larger ones in the future if I want to.