Areca Thunderbolt3 4 drive Hardware RAID Enclosure

  An absolute rock solid gem from Areca. Thunderbolt3 ARC8050T3 4 drive Hardware RAID. Built like a tank, it will be the foundation of your desktop. Nobody does RAID better than Areca. The perfect mix of world class hardware and software.

Incredible Reliability

  The onboard RAID processing with built in RAM caching and error monitoring add up to one of the most long term reliable storage systems ever made. Leave these up and running literally for years. (at MacGurus, our Areca RAIDs run 24/7 and are only shutdown occasionally to update capacities with new drives.)

Uncompromising Speed

  You can't get a faster hardware RAID5 box for 4 drives. The limitation is the mechanical speed of the drives themselves, the RAID controller and Thunderbolt buses are much larger bandwidth, installing faster drives equals more performance. Note, SSDs tend to get performance similar to spinning drives inside a hardware RAID controller designed to run SATA or SAS drives. If you are considering SSDs for greater speed then a RAID controller optimized for SSDs is recommended.

Bootable

  Areca Hardware RAID controllers are bootable on Mac OS computers. If you want your operating system on a super high speed RAID, here's your device.

Personal observations: Like all Areca storage products, this one is built like a tank. Solid steel construction, compact size and quiet fans that actually keep drive temps stable. This is the real deal. Every detail is complete, tastefully finished and rock solid. The management utility is quick and easy to use, and best of all, effective at managing a RAID5. Areca's long time support of the Mac platform, as well as PC and Linux platforms, means their utility is capable of repairs, recovery and long-term stability that will leave most other RAIDs in a shambles. This is literally the most important part of a RAID5. The management utility is the foundation that both performance and reliability are built on. The kind of Enterprise quality management utility that Areca provides allows the user to recover from RAID corruptions or hardware failures that leave lesser units dead in the water with subsequent reformatting of the array and total data loss. The RAID management utility is the most important and the costliest part of a quality RAID.   ~Rick