Stop buying external hard drives! The OWC Mercury Pro U.2 Review

Great video Chris!

Did you ever get the fan to shut up, or the LEDs off?

I’m looking for an alternative for my movie and tv collection which is now up to around 80TB. I hope the M.2 capacities increase so I could use this!!!

How loud is the FAN on this unit? Is the noise bearable?

I'm happy to finally have seen a customer review on this drive enclosure. I have a couple questions on your configuration and comments.
1. What "drives" are you using in your enclosure?
2. This enclosure uses both U.2 3.5 and 2.5 SSD drives. Right now the 4TB 2.5" drive (used WDG0TS1619AP) is going for ~$300 depending on whether you get a used one or brand new. These are NVMe drives but sequential read is up to 2690 MB/s (Mac) while sequential write (max) is up to (only) 930 MB/s. This is actually a slow write speed but I've seen issues on the M1 Macs having slow write speeds to external SSDs. Running RAID 0 across two of these U.2 SSDs might increase the write speed. Using these drives for an 8TB NVMe SSD drive is the least expensive way to get really fast R/W speeds. Right now using the used SSDs, the cost without SoftRAID (I already have a licensed copy for my other OWC RAID enclosures) would be $778.50, a bargain for 8TB.
3. Using NVMe blades, which should be faster than the U.2 SSDs ends up costing almost least twice as fast for the same 8TB ($1499). This includes two U.2 Shuttle One adaptors, on sale for $40 right now and eight 1TB NVMe blades (OWC Aura P12 Pro PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD). These have faster write speeds of 1979 MB/s. You need to carefully read the website to see what speeds are available on what types of hardware. (They finally are including this instead of using a custom built Windows PC with specialized hardware.) Again, I'm not sure if these specs are when using a single SSD or multiple SSDs in a RAID configuration.
4. As for the dust on your drives, it happens to me and everyone else all the time. At least with these drive enclosures you can vacuum off the dust that's caught on the outside. If you've ever opened up any computer, you'll see what a dust catcher every single one is. The only way to stop this is to run your computers in a dust-free environment, which would cost more than the computers you're running.
5. I agree about the logo light but I simply turn them backwards or hide them on a shelf. OWC/MacSales uses standard OTS fans. If they used the same quiet fans Apple uses in their computers, you'd see a significant price increase in OWC products. NVMe SSDs run pretty warm to hot. Putting several of them in an enclosure requires a cooling system so there's really no way around the noise other than putting them in a secondary enclosure with sound deadening features (or cable them through a wall into a closet or adjoining room 😉).

Those are NVMe drives. just packed into an SSD form factor, but U.2 has extra pins over normal ssd sata drives.

So chris can this be backed to a Synology thought TB

ugh. softraid is so lame. isn't is subscription based now? so much money. not worth it.

Good to find out it's noisy. That's a no-go for audio studio use. Are there any good multiple NVMe cases (hopefully four or more sticks) that are quiet, besides the insanely expensive OWC ThunderBlade cases?

SO will this take standard SSD drives ? I mean not the U.2 ones just normal ones SATA?

I have used OWC Thunderbolt products for years but starting in 2022 the reliability and customer service has really taken a large dive. They have also now moved to a 100 dollar a year subscription for the softraid software. This was not announced but customers were left to face a “upgrade your software licence” after updating our OS.

Last year clients were all forced to upgrade the software when OS X upgraded. This was explained as a requirement due to the new security model. It seemed understandable but the upgrade also seemed to introduce multiple kernel panics and constant reboots. This continued regularly for 9 months until Apple released an upgrade in June. The product still causes kernel panics after a cold boot and must be unplugged. Yes, I have spent many hours troubleshooting with the company. This year after upgrading my OSX I was faced with a “pay for licence” screen and I am unable to access the software. I can't even uninstall the software because it is locked behind the upgrade paywall. I am using the pro version of the software and this is how they support professional software, a paywall screen to get back into the software once you upgrade OSX.

I am looking at other options now.

Worst company in the business. Do not trust OWC, they’ll try and rip you off.

The noise: I don't understand why OWC products are so Noisy, all of them and changing the fan is not going to help a lot (being there done that). You can buy the empty box and buy a pair of Solidigm 31TB ssd 7998$ and get a better price, or buy two thunderblades, link them via thunderbolt and pay far less and have a totally silent platform, aldo with two cables and two power supplies (bricks). The other option is build your own with Sonnet technologies's Fusion U.2 (with haraware raid or software raid) or the M.2 Silent 4x4 or the M.2 8x and the Echo I for example, less expensive very quiet active colled.