OWCReviews of owcdigital.com

OWC chooses not to support Windows certification workflows that directly impact small businesses running Windows OS. They have made a business decision to avoid providing a Windows-native drive certification tool, offering a “Bring-Your-Own-Drive Certification Service” (which could even be implemented through local business partnerships as a drop off service contract), or offering Windows-ready pre-certified drives from multiple vendors. I purchased the ThunderBay FLEX 8 first, only to discover that it cannot be used with a PCIe add-in card on a Dell desktop because OWC DAS enclosures require a native Thunderbolt 3/4 port. I was never able to get a clear answer from OWC about whether the FLEX 8 is fully supported on Windows, especially since SoftRAID’s complete functionality is clearly designed around macOS. After returning the FLEX 8, I accepted a small discount to “downgrade” to the ThunderBay 8. For the last four months, I have attempted to certify eight Seagate Exos X20 18TB drives using SoftRAID Premium on a Dell XPS 15 with a native Thunderbolt controller. Each certification attempt (a 4-day process) locked up the laptop halfway through day two, even with UPS protection, cooling, and an optimized environment. Now the enclosure has failed completely — the drives no longer appear in SoftRAID at all, even when connected to a borrowed Mac (my screenshot to OWC Tier 2 Support showed SoftRAID reporting zero ThunderBay disks). I am forced to send the ThunderBay 8 back for RMA due to a backplane or logic board failure. In hindsight, I should have paid extra for OWC’s pre-certified Toshiba drives, because Windows users who bring their own drives are left without a reliable path to certification. I now have $6,000 worth of high end Seagate drives sitting idle, and a $9,000 total investment that has been unusable for over six months. My photography business is still running off twenty 4TB external drives and a second set stored in a fireproof safe. If this RMA does not resolve the issue and allow me to complete RAID-5 certification, I will have to reduce this to a one-star review. At this point, the delays and uncertainty are directly impacting my business, consuming valuable time without adding any value, and there is no guarantee that my photography workflow will ever work using the OWC line of DAS products.

In February 2023 I purchased a Mercury Pro Quad Elite desktop RAID. I'd like to start off by saying the buying experience was great. I spoke to a salesperson about my needs, my existing computer and network, He even asked me about the PC I was using, it's processor, motherboard and RAM. All of which I had at my fingertips, and he seemed impressed I had so much documentation. He recommended the drive I ended up purchasing. It worked like a dream until November when files being written to it were suddenly being corrupted. I was in the middle of a huge animation project and had gigabytes of rendered footage on the drive that wasn't completely backed up. I also had extensive scratch disk files that took hours to build and would be needed only until the project was finished. When I started noticing the problem I called OWC immediately and explained the problem. The guy I spoke to said he was aware that Adobe Scratch Files cause problems on RAIDS. I asked for more clarification and he said, Adobe Scratch Files "eat" RAIDS unless they are formatted for RAID 4 (mine came formatted RAID 5). They advised me to move all of my data off the RAID immediately, which I started to do. It was a process that Windows said would take approximately 10 hours. I checked on the progress after two hours and everything seemed to be going fine. But after 4 hours the copying process had stopped. I decided to wait until the next morning and checked to see it was still stopped with no estimate when it would complete. I clicked the CANCEL icon in the file copy window and the window closed. I then noticed that the RAID was not showing up on my desktop. I rebooted and still nothing. I immediately called tech support again and spoke to Cynthia, who immediately blamed me for the drive being corrupted by choosing to cancel the copying process. I rushed the RAID to a data recovery company to try and recover the unbacked-up data, which they were able to do, and cost a small fortune. When I received the RAID back from DiskSavers, I sent it back to OWC. I had an extensive phone conversation with a tech support person to see what my options were. I was wary about using this particular drive. They wouldn't consider anything but repairing the drive, even though I offered to pay the difference between this drive and a higher-priced model that was newer. I sent the drive back to them and after a month I got it back with no explanation of what had been wrong, or what they did to fix it. It came ready to set up, but I wanted to have a tech support person walk me through the process to make sure I wasn't going to end up in the same situation. He told me he knew about the issue with Adobe scratch files and recommended RAID 4. But when I got to the screen where I had to select which RAID option to use, only RAID 0, 1, and 5 were available. I was confused by this and we doublechecked to make sure I had the most recent SoftRaid version (I did). He was confused by this because it was an option on their Macintosh version. Anyway, with no other viable option I set up my unit as RAID 5. As soon as I tried to copy folder back from my emergency drives to the Pro Quad, I ran into problems. It stopped copying files within seconds. I tried again and again it stopped almost immediately. I tried to open the drive on my desktop to see how much actually copied over and the drive disappeared from my desktop. I restarted my PC and the drive had reappeared but as soon as I tried to copy files again, the drive disappeared. I opened SoftRaid to see if there was any diagnostic I could run. The RAID volume couldn't be seen, but the four physical drives were visible. The software did not have any ability to mount the volume and the only option was to reformat the RAID. I tried doing this a total of four times and had the same results. Each time after formatting the RAID it would appear on my desktop and each time I tried to write anything to it it would just disappear. I called OWC Tech Support and they sent me a diagnostic tool to run on my PC. After running it and sending them the file they claimed that my BIOS was outdated and I would need to update the BIOS. This PC was only two months old and was a custom build from Digital Storm. Digital Storm was able to help me update the BIOS but the RAID still wouldn't work. So again, I talked with OWC tech support and they walked me through even more steps, none of which worked. Eventually OWC asked me to return it again. I had to talk them into paying for the shipping since I they sent me an unusable drive. After not hearing from them for a month I called to see what the status of my drive, and they informed me that they had just sent the drive back to me after running tests on it and not finding anything wrong with it. The drive arrived a few days later but was missing the cables I shipped it back with. I no longer have the confidence to use this product.

Regrettably, I've found OWC's approach somewhat misleading. When you buy one of their Hardware Raid Solutions, it's not immediately clear that you also need to commit to an annual subscription for the SofRaid software (first 3 years are included). This detail is buried in the fine print, yet SofRaid is essential for both managing and utilizing the Raid. My experience with it has been fraught with issues, leading to periods, sometimes extending to months, where my Thunderbays were unusable (a quick glance at the Support Forum confirms I'm not alone). Consequently, the seemingly competitive initial purchase price escalates into a substantial total cost of ownership. In contrast, other leading brands like Promise, Qnap, and the now-defunct Drobo have historically included the necessary software at no extra charge

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