OWC ThunderBay Flex 8 enclosure and dock now available to order

After being announced earlier this year at CES 2020, OWC's new ThunderBay Flex 8 Thunderbolt 3 storage enclosure and dock is now available to order.

The ThunderBay Flex 8 is a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that has a unique ability to meld into a user's workflow. The vast array of customizations makes it perfect for Mac Pro users or any professionals dealing with terabytes of data at home, in the studio, or out on location.

There are eight universal 3.5/2.5-inch drive bays that can support SATA/SAS1 and U.2/M.22 NVMe drives for up to 128TB of total capacity and real-world transfer speeds of up to 2750MB/s. Users can mix and match the different drives between SSDs and HDDs and set their RAID preference.

As mentioned, it also acts as a Thunderbolt 3 docking station with additional ports. There are two front-mounted USB-A ports, a USB-C port, an SD card slot and a CFExpress card reader. On the back is a second Thunderbolt 3 port to daisy chain additional Thunderbolt devices as well as a DisplayPort 1.4 port. Users can use a PCIe x16 connector/x4 lane slot for audio/video capture, networking, SSD storage, hardware RAID card, or an I/O card

AppleInsider got a hands-on look at the ThunderBay Flex 8 earlier this year when it debuted at CES 2020. We were excited by the flexibility of such an enclosure for creative professionals who are dealing with massive amounts of storage while out on a shoot or in the studio.

The fact it doubles as a dock with its myriad of ports and 85W of pass-through charging makes it even more powerful for a user's workflow.

The OWC ThunderBay Flex 8 is available to order now from MacSales.com. It is available as an empty enclosure for your own drives or in 16TB and 128TB configurations. Pricing starts at $1,199.

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12 Comments

razorpit 18 Years · 1793 comments

About 4 years ago

Nice looking hardware. Wish I could justify one. :)

I know there's a ton of TB3 equipped Macs out there, but I hope they also have a USB4 version on the way.

sflocal 17 Years · 6148 comments

This looks like a fantastic product that could possibly convince me to retire my two Promose TB2 RAID arrays as soon as I upgrade my 2015 iMac to a 2020 iMac later this year.

Has anyone had experience with OWC's SoftRAID software? I'm a bit confused by it. My Promise arrays have an onboard RAID controller so technically, no software is needed once configured. I can plug another Mac into it with zero software on it and it would all function normally.

Is the SoftRAID software necessary in order to use the storage array in normal day-to-day operations once the unit has been configured? Can I plug in say my MacBook for that rare, large backup without installing Soft RAID?

I'm a little hesitant to consider any product that uses software RAID. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

sflocal said:

This looks like a fantastic product that could possibly convince me to retire my two Promose TB2 RAID arrays as soon as I upgrade my 2015 iMac to a 2020 iMac later this year.
Has anyone had experience with OWC's SoftRAID software? I'm a bit confused by it. My Promise arrays have an onboard RAID controller so technically, no software is needed once configured. I can plug another Mac into it with zero software on it and it would all function normally.

Is the SoftRAID software necessary in order to use the storage array in normal day-to-day operations once the unit has been configured? Can I plug in say my MacBook for that rare, large backup without installing Soft RAID?

I'm a little hesitant to consider any product that uses software RAID. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a Mercury Elite Pro Quad with the software. I’m 99.99% sure you need the software on any machine you plan to use the device on. You do need to leave it on the machine to see the health of the array’s. Their sales support is incredible. Go to their site and chat with them. They’ll be able to confirm.

With that said I’ve been using it for about a year and a half now and have never had any problems with the hardware or software. With this setup you have a considerably powerful processor running the show. An on device processor could never be as powerful.

What’s your concern?

steve_jobs 5 Years · 86 comments

What about the rack mounted mac pro variant to build the hard raid. ;) always good to know : https://tidbits.com/2018/07/23/what-apfs-does-for-you-and-what-you-can-do-with-apfs/

razorpit said:

sflocal said:

This looks like a fantastic product that could possibly convince me to retire my two Promose TB2 RAID arrays as soon as I upgrade my 2015 iMac to a 2020 iMac later this year.
Has anyone had experience with OWC's SoftRAID software? I'm a bit confused by it. My Promise arrays have an onboard RAID controller so technically, no software is needed once configured. I can plug another Mac into it with zero software on it and it would all function normally.

Is the SoftRAID software necessary in order to use the storage array in normal day-to-day operations once the unit has been configured? Can I plug in say my MacBook for that rare, large backup without installing Soft RAID?

I'm a little hesitant to consider any product that uses software RAID. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a Mercury Elite Pro Quad with the software. I’m 99.99% sure you need the software on any machine you plan to use the device on. You do need to leave it on the machine to see the health of the array’s. Their sales support is incredible. Go to their site and chat with them. They’ll be able to confirm.

With that said I’ve been using it for about a year and a half now and have never had any problems with the hardware or software. With this setup you have a considerably powerful processor running the show. An on device processor could never be as powerful.

What’s your concern?

My promise software also has an accompanying utility to configure and monitor the RAID array. I don't have to install it. I can just plug my iMac (or any other TB2-equipped machine) into the drive array and use it like any other external drive.

Depending on where I'm at - and the site I'm at - I sometimes plug different machines into it, with zero utilities. Will OWC's drives allow that functionality, or will it refuse to work I (for example), remove the cable and plug it into my laptop and no SoftRAID software on it? That would be a deal-breaker for me. My Promise drive has hardware-RAID. I don't want my Mac to be handling the RAID processing. I just don't know exactly with SoftRAID does and there's little info about it that I could find.