[Aluminum] I tried several enclosures and I finally think I found a winner. This thing is solid. Really solid and the fan is so quiet I didn't think it worked at first. However you can definitely feel it. Seriously good bye especially when you can switch HDDs out as your needs change for more storage.

[6 TB] I am a professional videographer and editor and my editing system is set up so I can fly effortlessly on it. However, because some of my peripherals are supported by older OS it is difficult to find external drives that are supported by an older OS as well as still have FW800 ports. OWC ticked both boxes so I bought an 8TB version hoping that it will have enough space to last a couple of years.

I just finished editing a 2-month editing project with about 300GB of greenscreen, video of different codecs and a fair amount of compositing. The drive has performed flawlessly.

I wanted to dock it one star because this thing is noisy...disconcertingly so. I was backing everything up every day to other drives in case this one crashed. If I moved the drive slightly, the vibrating noise would go away but come back. After a while, I realized the drive was not going to crash but never got used to all the buzzing and humming.

I gave it 5-stars regardless of the noise because while all the other manufacturers assume all us users buy a new computer system every year, OWC realizes that there are a lot of older systems still out here being used and making money despite ever-tighter profit margins so kudos to them for that!

[Aluminum] Very good. I strongly recommen it!

[Yes] This enclosure looks like it's from the 1990s. It's heavy, it's metal, it has a fan AND it has a built-in power supply. It has a power cord, but NO BRICK! There is a second USB-C port to daisy chain more devices.
I have an 8TB Iron Wolf Pro installed and the Tech Tool Pro software is measuring write speed at 345 MB/s, read speed at 278 MB/s. I have not installed an SSD yet, but you can install a 2.5 SSD or HDD in this box. I am very happy with this enclosure at this point. I may have to get another one if this one starts to get lonely.

[36.00 W] Solid enclosure with decent ventilation. Has a proper, full size USB connector (not one of the flimsy mini/micro connectors that can snap easily). Has an actual on/off switch (so it won't just randomly turn on/off if you connect/disconnect it but don't actually want to change whether it's on/off...). Relatively quiet, and comes with rubber feet to isolate from vibrations/bumps of whatever it's sitting on.

[6 TB] I bought this for use with a 22TB HDD that I'd bought to archive a large engineering project I'd recently completed. So far, so good. It's rugged, and the hard drive's temperatures topped out at 40C. It gets along fine with Linux; I saw no errors reported. Performance is on par with what other reviewers have mentioned.

[Aluminum] I have 2 daisy-chained and cloned using CCC. World great!

[6 TB] Very easy to set up, completely quiet. Good quality construction.


Installed an 18 GB spinny drive, plugged it in, and got to work. Love that it comes with a cable, has a power switch, and an internal power supply (no wall wart!). May order another one just to have a spare (because products get discontinued, and I like things to match).


Haven't tried the external USB-C port, but I would daisy-chain a second unit.


Would purchase again.

[ 3.5" HDD ] I bought a 3TB version several years ago (4 or 5) and it's continued to work very well. I use it for General Use, non-professional, so I am not as demanding on it as a pro would be. But I do use it as a main drive, not as a backup drive, for which a non-pro model would suffice. I like the faster 7,200 RPM speed.

It has an On/Off switch, but I always just leave it in the On position and it's been fine for years, the Drive still goes to sleep on it's own when not in use.

I am on here shoppping considering a new model, probably will get more TB this time, considering the price isn't much more.


The build quality is excellent and that's the main reason to get OWC is for the solid enclosure and the extra ports, especially if you still like to have Firewire.

[6 TB] I use this drive for my FCPX video editor. It is fast enough to keep up with my 1920 x 1080 videos