{"id":94994,"date":"2024-08-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=94994"},"modified":"2024-08-14T09:13:06","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T14:13:06","slug":"getting-the-most-performance-out-of-spinning-hard-drives-part-3-multi-drive-enclosures-provide-convenience-and-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/94994-getting-the-most-performance-out-of-spinning-hard-drives-part-3-multi-drive-enclosures-provide-convenience-and-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting the Most Performance out of Spinning Hard Drives, Part 3: Multi-Drive Enclosures Provide Convenience and Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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As discussed in Part 1 <\/a>and Part 2<\/a> of this series, there are two key ways to optimize hard drive performance to both guarantee minimum performance as well as to guarantee best performance for all the new stuff. Those articles apply to all<\/em> hard drive solutions, single-drive or multi-drive or RAID. For Part 3, we will be focusing on multi-drive enclosures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Single hard drive external solutions rock, but do not scale<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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OWC Mercury Elite Pro<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Single hard drive solutions not only have their place, but I consider them fundamental protection against data calamity. I have two OWC Mercury Elite Pro<\/a> solutions, each with a 22TB hard drive<\/a> installed. With complete backups of everything I have, they go along on trips in a padded case (in my Sprinter van<\/a>), just in case disaster were to strike back at home. With hard drives now up to 24TB, very few users are not well served by these solutions (for some reason OWC currently offers 20TB as the highest capacity, but you can BYO with an empty OWC Mercury Elite Pro enclosure<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The downside is that external hard drives quickly get messy: a separate power supply with gangly power cord and its own power cord to the enclosure are not exactly elegant. A relatively bulky enclosure vs the hard drive itself. Plus a limit on the number of USB ports. These factors quickly make more than two external single-drive solutions a headache. The mess of wires on my desk has proved that more than once, which is why I limit myself to two external single-drive hard drives at a time, and only for backup purposes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not averse to dual-drive solutions like the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual<\/a>. These are excellent. However, at least for me, the simplicity<\/em> of single-drive units is a key selling point, and the flexibility<\/em> of 4\/8 drive units is compelling. The middle ground of dual-drive units is less interesting for my needs, however, the dual-drive units do offer a simple way of getting two drives in one unit which can optionally implement fault tolerance or RAID-0 striping in as simple a package as possible. They can make sense for many situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Best hard drive enclosure ever designed?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When the OWC ThunderBay 4 <\/a>first appeared years ago, I was so impressed with how it solved the multi-drive problem. To this day, I don\u2019t think there has been a better solution invented for all-around use. See my numerous reviews of the various ThunderBay models<\/a>. I have five ThunderBay 4 units and also a ThunderBay 8 and ThunderBay 6 (since discontinued).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why do I like ThunderBay so much?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n