StarTech.com4 Bay Thunderbolt 3 NVMe Enclosure, For M.2 NVMe SSD Drives, 1x DisplayPort Video/ 2x TB3 Downstream Ports, 40Gbps, 72W Power Supply, External Hard Drive Enclosure , TAA (M2E4BTB3)

I bought this to use as a RAID 1+0 external drive for my Mac Studio M1 Max. The unit itself is well made and very compact, and it's a simple job to install the drives. I used the Apple RAID Assistant to set up RAID 1+0 (a stripe of mirrors) with 4 Crucial P3 Plus 4TB NVMe drives. Read performance was as expected for PCIe 3, around 2,500MB/s but write was disappointing at just over 1,200MB/s. The write and read speeds dropped very quickly after copying around 10GB of video files, only managing sustained speeds of 350MB/s write and 500MB/s read (my G-RAID spinning drives are as fast), turns out it was the Crucial drives at fault, not the enclosure, so DON'T buy or use cheap QLC drives in this enclosure, best with high quality TLC or MLC drives such as the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, Samsung 980 Pro or 990 Pro (I know these are all PCIe 4 so the max you will get on PCIe 3 is around 3,000MB/s write / 3,500MB/s read).My biggest issue with the enclosure was the volume randomly unmounting, even during file operations. This was not due to any power management, and the temperature of the individual drives remained well within limits. I tried using a single drive, two drives in RAID 0 and RAID 1, JBOD with all four drives, and even another 1TB drive I had but the unmount issue remained. I believe the one I received must have been faulty as I had a long call with Apple support and we tried everything possible. I have since returned this and replaced it with the OWC Express 4M2 which remains mounted, although the speed is still the same, hence pointing at the Crucial drives which have also been returned.As others have pointed out the fan is very noisy, more a high pitched squeal that becomes quite distracting after a while. But overall it's a well made compact enclosure that should work well but let down by the noisy fan and, in my case, a faulty device.

Build quality is excellent and incredibly compact, this could be the smallest of it's class. I tested with 4x 8TB NVMe and it was fantastic..... However, the fan is far too noisy for my near-quiet M1 Max Macbook Pro.I went with the larger competitor Drive, which also came with free Raid Software. From reviews/recommendations, I replaced the supplied fan, along with a speed reducer and it's been perfect for my needs.Note! Whichever model you use, buy a UPS, as NVMe SSD RAIDs are very sensitive to power-cuts - I learnt the hard way.

The age old 'up to' caveat. I wasn't able to get anywhere near the advertised speeds, despite using four 5000MBps 4TB drives in RAID 10 (which is essentially striped like RAID 0), and attaching it directly to a Thunderbolt 4 port. Real world performance was closer to 480MBps.But the real dealbreaker for me was the fan noise. The unit doesn't appear to throttle the fan according to need. It just runs the fan at full speed from the second the device is connected. And the fan can't be efficient, because the enclosure gets REALLY hot during use, to the point where I was worried about leaving it unattended due to it being a potential fire hazard.This is the first Startech.com product I have bought which I haven't been absolutely delighted with. Very disappointing!