Oyen Digital/DataTale Thunderbolt RAID?

I'm going from a 2008 MacPro to a new 2013 iMac (BTO 3.5) and was looking for a Thunderbolt enclosure for my existing internal drives. I've not read about this one:

oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/RS-M4T.html

I've used Oyen Digital external portable FW800 drives in the past and have found them to be of excellent quality. Now this is not Thunderbolt 2, but I don't need that. I got it from Amazon (five total reviews, all 5 star) for $599 and am just waiting on my iMac to arrive Sat. to test it. I plan to use two of the slots for a RAID 0, then the other two for another HDD and an SSD.

I had a question about the configuration options and got an excellent reply from Oyen Digital tech support in less than 3 hours.

This just seems like a good price for an empty enclosure. It even comes with a Thunderbolt cable and a simple tote bag like carrying case for it. Anybody else seen or using this? Am I missing something?

Let us know how you got/get on with this enclosure. It's looks like a great TB option.

I'm very happy with it on my late 2013 top end iMac (3.5ghz and 24mb ram). I've only had it 2 months but it's worked flawlessly. The build quality is excellent. It's pretty quiet for a bunch of bare drives only covered by a sliding panel, but it is slightly louder than my old MacPro with internal drives parked on the floor. It comes with a long enough TB cable to set it on the floor, but I'm just hiding it behind the iMac.

It's only TB1, but it's so much faster than my MacPro 2008 with internal drives. I did set it up with four 2TB drives in 2 separate 2-disk Raid 0s. Read the Amazon reviews for a few warnings. The included software seems to have a couple of glitches (I just used Disk Utility) and the mounting screws are a bit fiddly (I'm not real handy with that stuff but was able to get them to work after only a little confusion).

I realized my existing 2 internal 2TB drives were from 2009 or 2010, so I did buy two new ones. I got WD black drives (model number ends in FZEX) that are slightly faster than the previous model (FAEX). The 2 drive raid 0 with the 2013 drives is getting ca. 300 MB/s, the second raid with the 2009/2010 drives is getting ca. 200 MB/s. I use the faster RAID as my media drive and the slower as long term storage. Remember that none of these are SSDs - I could of course get higher numbers if I used SSDs or more disks in the RAIDs.

I have the internal iMac 1 TB fusion drive and the faster RAID on a Time Machine backup to a USB 3 4TB external. The second RAID is cloned nightly (SuperDuper) to a USB 3 3TB external.

I've been very pleased. If you already have drives that you can use it's an especially great way to add external TB storage.

I'll be glad to answer more questions.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm on a very similar spec Hackintosh. My main media drive is 2x WD Black 1TB HDDs on OSX software RAID0 which read around 220MB/s that's is backed up nightly onto 2x 3TB WD Green Drives hardware in an eSata hardware RAID0 which read around 230MB/s. I also store personal projects on the eSata enclosure

I'm now looking for a decent speed boost.
So it's either something like this enclosure, or drop in a few more internal SSDs...
One minor issue with a Hackintosh is that thunderbolt isn't hot-swappable.

One review on Amazon.com it looks like a 4x HDD might give around 500MB/s.
I assume you are using the enclosure in the JBOD mode and the Disk Utility RAID setup?
I wonder if the hardware RAID0 is much quicker than an OSX software RAID0?

Cheers, Duncan.