OWCMercury Elite Pro Dual Mini Portable (0GB Enclosure)

Pros:* Great engineering and production qualities* Solid aluminum chassis, practically perfect fit of parts, easy to work with* The best small enclosure solution I've seen for a RAID-1 SSD configuration* Physical assembly instructions adequate enoughCons:* Setup and configuration instructions not fully included (depending on your RAID config)* No OS-specific instructions out of the box, and some confusing advice online (generally, not OWC in particular)* Validation of operation and interpreting the blinky lights is a bit unclearI wanted to move from an HDD to SSD. Originally, I figured I would just get a single SSD enclosure and work with that. But when I ran across this item, I could see the potential: RAID-1 redundancy for SSD, if only I could find a pair of SSDs priced "reasonably" (it's all relative when it comes to SSDs) enough to accept for my budget.Rather than buy one of the two apparent leaders (Samsung and Western Digital), I found that Crucial makes what appears to be an equally highly-rated 4TB SSD for about $100-$150 less (each) compared to the category leaders. So I figured I'd take a chance. If the lower priced SSD drives fail, then hopefully the RAID-1 configuration will offer me extra insurance -- at the price of this enclosure that seemed like a good deal to me.(Note: I always do cloud and secondary physical drive backups, so my OWC RAID-1 is not a single point of failure, but it's a nice feature to have anyway when you are as paranoid about data loss as I am)Assembly was easy enough -- just following the instructions, I can see that the SSDs will be solidly screwed into place and WILL NOT move when installed properly.The tricky part was figuring out how to complete the configuration for my Mac. Some specific steps NOT described in this documentation (but kinda described elsewhere at OWC and from other sources) were necessary:* Flip the switch from "OFF" to "ON" on the back of the OWC unit (while unplugged)* Change the RAID config dial to "RAID-1" (or other if you are planning to use it differently)* Then, you can plug in the drive to a USB-C port on your Mac (in my case anyway) -- the external power supply is not required when you are running low power SSDs* Press and hold the rear reset button for 3 seconds (important to reset the RAID config)* Using Disk Utility, you need to format the OWC unit as "GUID Partition Format" and set the File System as "APFS", giving the disk a name like "My Disk" (or whatever you choose)* Using Disk Utility, you may need to further format the logical "My Disk" volume as APFS (APFS is recommended for newer Mac use and is better for SSDs)* Now here's a tricky point... after I did this Disk Utility showed two disks, one blue and one red (apparently not working). It looked wrong and something seemed off, but the solution was to simply eject the entire disk (from Finder or Disk Utility). unplug it, then plug it back in. Once plugged back in, everything registered in Disk Utility just fine (a single 4TB disk, which is what we should expect with RAID-1, where the two disks are supposed to be "hidden" behind the RAID hardware controller and appear as a single unit)Once I figured out these steps in MacOS, everything seemed to go pretty amazingly well. I'm only a day into using this but I ran a large backup and have run disk checks and watched the lights and all seems good.I am still a little confused about the behavior of the flashing lights; when a write occurs, both flash in tandem, but when reading it seems only one flashes while the other stays a solid blue. No red lights so far, so I assume this is normal and good working behavior.Anyway, I wanted to pass along a little bit of learning from my own experience. I will update if necessary, but I assume some negative reviews might be related to particular setup difficulties or OS/hardware configurations. This is inevitable with a product built to work for a wide variety of configurations, I think.Because some of the setup was indeed a little confusing at first, I might have given this product four stars, but because it seems to be unique on the market for its size and quality of build, I really have to give it five stars. In a perfect world we would have five or ten competitors producing a similar product all of which are great and provide some different options for different situations. At the moment that does not seem to be the case, and in my own case the end result seems to be extremely good, so I will grant the five stars until and unless I am proved wrong.I did not run any specific performance tests but informally it appears to be much faster than my previous spindle HDD drives, and that is good enough for my case.A really high quality feeling product with a few setup mysteries, perhaps, but bottom line I am pleased!

This full metal case feels great, however there's a few issues I've seen in the first use. Primarily, LED cables under drive tray is like put against the bottom of the hard drive. The drive is forced to lift up if it doesn't secure by screws. The cable will be heat up when hard drive gets warm. Also, the plug is loose and doesn't stay put in DC power port. Last, the on/off switch button is tiny and hardly to slide it on or off.I also learned that this model doesn't work with type-C to thunderbolt 2 converter to a computer with thunderbolt 2 ports, but okay with type-C to A.

This unit works fine with Proxmox/Linux (and tested on Win11 too). It's properly seen as a USB Attached Storage (UAS) device at 10Gbps with USB-C on an old NUC 7. Stays cool under constant "on" time, no fans. I use it in "Individual" disk mode, so I can't comment on the RAID configs...I let Proxmox manage RAID instead. Can get the S.MA.R.T. status with smartctl if you use the "-d sata" option flag. It's fast and robust enough for 6 FHD cameras of video security storage and playback.

I use this enclosure for my Macbook Pro backup. It is great and super fast. I was simple to set up RAID 1 and have the 2 drives mirror each other. I bought just the enclosure because you can find some great deals on larger SSD drives for better prices than the full assembled kits. If you don't own a screwdriver, then this might not be for you, but otherwise very straight forward to get goind.

Use as extra data security in case of failure for Time Machine Backup. It works well. It was easy to install and compatible with macbook pro.

Short version:This enclosure does not function with Mac Ventura and would not format the drives, would cause Finder to freeze, and the Mac to become unresponsive. Formatting/setting up on an older operating system solves this problem. Obviously it (the chipset?) is not compatible with modern Mac operating systems. If yours doesn't work, know that OWC does not respond to tech support inquiries, so just set it up on an older version of MacOS. Hope it helps : )Long version:I am a media production professional and require fast, reliable storage for video editing. This product promises to fill an important niche and the fact that it uses relatively inexpensive 2.5" ssds and is bus powered were appealing to me.However, when I went to set up the device I had HUGE problems. The Mac would recognize the drives, but Finder would freeze, causing the Mac to become unresponsive and only a hard reset would bring it back. It was not possible to format or set up the RAID configuration as described in OWC's instruction sheet and online product manual would not work. The product simple would not respond, and the lights would not blink as described in the instruction sheet. This was the case on 2 different Macs, a Mac Mini m1 and a recent MacBook Pro, both running uptodate Ventura Mac OS, and naturally I swapped out the cables as well.I contacted OWC's tech support and as of writing this review it has been 6 days and I have not heard back.Had I not been on location for a job (South America) I would have just sent this product back to Amazon, but since I did not have that option I continued my troubleshooting, without absolutely no response from OWC. Finally it occurred to me that it might be helpful to use an older Mac, and fortunately I had access to an ancient 2010 MacBook pro hand-me-down running Mac OS Sierra.What do you know, the Product worked perfectly!!!! I repeated the EXACT procedure I had done countless times on my modern Macs only this time the lights blinked and it set itself up as if by magic. I then reformatted my drives and unplugged it from that dusty 13 year-old Mac and it has been working perfectly on my modern Macs without issue.Obviously there is a compatibility issue here, probably with the chipset but I do not have the technical knowledge to say exactly what the problem is.What is clear to me is that OWC is selling out-of-date hardware, does not respond to tech support inquiries (they HAVE to be aware of this issue), and their negligence could have significant costs for their customers in the form of damaged drives/hardware.If yours doesn't work as expected, try setting it up on an older version of Mac OS, that worked for me!