OWCOWCTB2U3DKR2 Dual Dock Drive Bay Solution

Thunderbolt is not a cheap interface, hence the cost, but this is well worth the outlay.My issue was creating a start up drive for the small Mac Pro desktop (mid 2013), which comes with only 256Gb in the onboard memory. I really needed a lot more on the start up drive, and this unit provided the solution.OWC products are very well made, and I've used them before, with no problems. This unit accommodates 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives and I chose 2 x Samsung SSDs for the unit. They're not cheap either, but with the thunderbolt connection provided by the Drive Dock the startup time wasn't any slower than from the onboard SSD. At a stroke, the Start up drive space was quadrupled on each of the two new SSDs, and the OWC dock can be set to clone one drive to another, although by preference I use an app.I do a lot of video editing so speed and storage are the two main concerns; the OWC drive dock meets all my requirements and more.

We use this unit with 2 Sandisk SSD's and a bonafide Apple cable. Works brilliantly. Also tried it with a cheap cable and found that it is only a little bit slower, surprising.

In common with other reviewers, I've had problems with it refusing to mount one disc. Trick is, after you've applied power make sure both discs are on as it like to turn one off.

When it works it is very fast - I’m getting 540MB/s transfers with my SSDs. Also it’s a fairly unique unit, I couldn’t find another dual-dock unit with Thunderbolt 2 anywhere. But… sometimes a sata drive will need to be repeatedly inserted into the dock to be mounted, this applies when using both SSD and regular hard drives, or combinations of both. This happens more often when a drive is already in one of the docks - it shouldn’t happen at all. Turning it off and turning it on again will sometimes remedy this but it’s a very poor solution for such an expensive piece of kit. And because of these issues I could NOT recommend this unit… well not at this price anyway!Pros:Impressive Thunderbolt 2 speeds.Includes both a USB3 and a TB cable.Built-in power supply.Nicely built, feels solid.Metal outer casing.Silent… no fan.Cons:Buggy and inconsistent mounting of drives on desktop.Inconsistent transfer speeds via Thunderbolt from each dock.Dock 2 is marginally but consistently slower than Dock 1 via Thunderbolt 2.The drive docks are a tight fit - for both HDs and SSDsThere is no release mechanism to help eject the drives.The price is way to high for what it does and the current issues it has.

I have a Mac Pro (2013) model. It has Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.0 ports with 1TB internal SSD. I believe this is the max storage they came with at the time I bought it. I use it primarily for music/audio production and have it loaded with tons of virtual instruments and samplers (from Native Instruments, Spectrasonics, Arturia etc). Everything was working great until I recently updated to Live 10 and could barely fit the packs on the drive, and NI Ultimate 12 was on its way. It was time to increase the storage the system.The options are limited: there’s the OWC internal SSD drive but it runs close to $2k. I looked all over the place for external enclosure with Thunderbolt 2 connections. There are lots of drives with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity but not Thunderbolt 2.I have tried a similar approach in the past in another system with older technology (USB2 and Firewire 800) and found that loading large samples of the sort that come with Native Instruments drummer modules or their orchestral samples take an excruciating amount of time to load, killing workflow and creativity. In that case, I finally resorted to a larger internal SSD drive which I partitioned; one partition was dedicated to the NI instruments and loading time was great since everything was being piped through the internal bus. I was hoping that in this case, Thunderbolt 2 would be fast enough to make external vs. internal a moot point. Also, that was an economically viable option as the internal SSD had a standard SATA interface; these drives are relatively inexpensive these days, as opposed to what is needed for the Mac Pro which uses a proprietary interface to a “blade” style SSD; OWC provides a solution but comes at the $2k price tag.I struck out trying to find external enclosure with a Thunderbolt 2 interface: by now Apple has moved on to Thunderbolt 3 with USB C type connectors; there lots of T3 to T2 adaptors but every single one I found would allow you to connect a T2 device to a T3 system (like to a new iMac), but not the other way around (a T3 drive to a Mac Pro). I finally stumbled on to this. I added a 1TB external Samsung 860 Evo SSD. Overall the cost was $311 when I bought these in November 2018I have included some of my own test results at the bottom of this review, if you care to read them. I am happy to report that I am very pleased with the performance. Huge samples load quickly. I placed all of Live 10 sound packs on the external drive. For Native Instruments, I have moved most of the big sample libraries to the external drive (NI lets you do this on an instrument by instrument basis, which is a nice option, but also allowed me to do real world comparison of internal vs. external loading times).In conclusion, I found that in practice, in actual use I really can’t tell the difference in loading times between internal vs. external, in other words opening up large libraries does not get in my way of making music, and that’s a good thing. Also, after 6 weeks of use, it only went to sleep on me once; another customer has commented on this. That was not a big deal for me as I don’t use this for automated backups. In my case, I have installed a HDD in the second bay and I do on-demand backups with Superduper.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Real world clock: how long it takes to load Native Instruments Kontakt instruments.System: Mac Pro (late 2013). 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5. 64 GB RAM. Graphics AMD DirePro D500 3072 MB. MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6For Read/Write tests, I used The Blackmagic Speedtest app (available for free at the Mac App store). For load times, I used my iPhone timer: I started the timer at the same time I clicked to load the library and stopped when it was done loading. Note that in all cases (Speedtest and timer) times varied, particularly when loading samples: if you load the same sample shortly after loading it earlier, it takes much shorter; probably due to caching. So, below, I show the results after a fresh boot:Blackmagic Speedtest results:Internal vs. External (via OWC bay in Thunderbolt 2)Write: 908.5 MB/s vs. 480 MB/s (ratio 1.89)Read: 889.0 MB/s vs. 513 MB/s (ratio 1.73)According to sppedtest, the internal drive is almost twice as fast at both writing and reading, BUT the load times of the Kontakt libraries are practically indistinguishable, in fact in some cases, appeared to be faster. Also, in auditioning some of the instruments, I didn’t hear and weird sound artifacts or crackling; probably attributed to the fact that the Mac Pro has huge memory (64 GB), and so more than likely, once the samples are loaded, you don’t have too stream from the disk).Load times: First set of numbers when the libraries are on the built-in drive on the Mac Pro.Second set of numbers when the libraries are on the external 1TB Samsung SSD connected via the OWC bay using Thunderbolt 2:60s drummer - AR60s early Kit Full: 7.23 s. vs. External: 6.45 s80s drummer - AR 80s black kit Full: 12.10 s. vs. External: 11.1 s.Vintage Drummer - Ebony Kit Full: 10.06 s. vs. External 9.48sModern Drummer - AR Modern White kit: 3.96 s. vs. External: 3.56 sSessions Strings Pro: Section 1 & 2: Contemporary: Sections 1 & 2 Ensemble perf: 7.75 s. vs. External: 7.05 sSessions Horns Pro: Sessions Horns Pro Key Switch: 16.68 s. vs. External 12.1 sI also tested using the USB port of the OWC, compared to a SATA-to-USB adapter (StarTech USB 3.0 to 2.5" SATA III). I used the same SSD drive in both cases. Note the back of the OWC disk bay says USB 3.1, but my Mac has 3.0 portsSSD via sata-to-usb adapter vs. OWC connected via USB 3.0Write: 351.7 MS/s vs. 323 MB/sRead: 349.1 MB/s vs. 344.6 MB/s

Prodotto adatto a chi come me ha necessità di una connessione Thunderbolt. Ho solo USB2, Firewire800 e Thunderbolt sul mio vecchio iMac2011 e mi serviva qualcosa per aiutarmi ad upgradarlo. Ho cambiato l'HD interno con un SSD e volevo qualcosa per aiutarmi a reinstallare tutto senza rischiare di perdere nessun dato, in particolare foto e documenti.Avrei potuto optare per un semplice case con connessione usb ma oltre ad allungare di molto i tempi di trasferimento non mi sarebbe stato utile per futuri backup.Ho anche un sistema Nas con due drive che però non uso mai perchè trovo alquanto scomopdo. Cosi ho deciso di prendere questa docking station a due slot per HD da 3,5 Sata e SSD.Velocità spettacolare, solidità e silenziosità fanno di questo sistema la soluzione più adatta a chi volesse trovare un modo semplice e rapido per fare backup dei propri dati o utilizzare una memoria esterna per lavorare su dati che non vuole mantenere sul computer.Comodi tasti di accensione per i due slot e la possibilità di fare la copia offline (non l'ho ancora usata) lo rendono molto bello da vedere e di facile utilizzo.Costruzione solida, anche se ho letto di problemi con i cavi dopo un certo tempo di utilizzo....vedremo cosa succede.Il cavo thunderbolt è incluso. Il cavo USB3 no. Chiedere al commerciante nel caso.

... eine Docking Station für Thunderbolt. Sehr robust und schwer gearbeitet. Die Platten lassen sich nach Bedarf aktivieren und deaktivieren. Dazu unterstützt die Station die Software "Softraid" mit der man die Funktionalität noch erweitern kann.

... wer seine Daten liebt kann ruhig mal ein wenig mehr zahlen und bekommt ein schnelles Dock mit Thunderbolt 2 und USB 3.1 ohne hässliches Netzteil wie es bei dem ein oder anderen Herstellern zur Zeit üblich ist.

I was excited to see a thunderbolt dual-bay dock from the maker of my favorite quad-bay thunderbolt enclosure, but my enthusiasm quickly waned due to what seems like a clunky (and possibly risky to the drive) drive insertion/removal design.As you would expect from OWC, this thunderbolt-enabled OWC Drive Dock Dual Bay is solidly built. I like that the power supply is inside the unit (no external brick) and connects to AC via a standard 2-prong power cord. I also like that (unlike another brand dual-bay thunderbolt dock) there are TWO thunderbolt ports so it can be in the middle of a daisy chain. The built-in USB 3 capability is a nice bonus, although I use thunderbolt myself. USB 3 and thunderbolt and power cables are included.There is a toggle power switch on the back of the unit, plus a separate power switch for each drive.My chief complaint - and it's a pretty big one - is the drive insertion and removal is very rough... NOT suitable IMO for hot-swapping. Unlike docks from BlacX, there is no 'eject button' to physically 'lift' the drive free of the connector while still keeping the drive safely in the holder. With this dock you have to grab a hold of the drive and tug pretty hard... and then when the drive does suddenly detaches from the connector while you're pulling that hard there is a tendency to jerk the drive free of the housing, not something you want to be doing with spinning media! (Docks with a "eject button' give you a controlled detach by lifting the drive just enough to detach from the connector, then you can easily lift the drive free.)Inserting a drive is pretty rough too... again, unlike the BlackX (where inserting drive is smooth and it's very obvious when it is 'seated' into the connector) on this dock when you insert the disk it's not really seated, it requires some extra force to seat the drive which results in some jarring.I also note on another website that Toshiba X300 drives have a screw that protrudes just enough more than other drives to hang on the inside of the door of the dock, making insertion and removal even tricker.A minor complaint is the power cable is pretty short, a little over 3 feet. Ditto the USB 3 cable (a mere 27"). The thunderbolt cable is a respectable 39".