OWC Gemini 24TB Thunderbolt 3 Dock and Dual-Drive RAID Solution

Test Rig:Razer Blade Pro 2020 (RTX 2080, 32GB)Win10 x64, Thunderbolt 3OWC Mercury Elite Pro (empty), added 2x 4TB WD Red ProInitial thoughts:I wanted to write a review of this product from a Windows user point of view as many computers on this side of the spectrum still don't come equipped with TB3. I'm running 2x 4TB drives in Raid0 formatted in exFAT.Overall, the enclosure is pretty solid feeling, made out of metal with nice rubber feet. Since I went with spinning drives, the feet help absorb the vibration of the drives on my desk, and it's barely noticeable.I've connected the enclosure to my laptop with the included TB3 cable. My laptop doesn't have an onboard ethernet port, so the dock's gigabit ethernet port was a nice feature. I am running a RedNet X2P Dante interface, and I have no additional latency in Dante Controller and everything works nominally. Ookla speed test doesn't show any difference between my old TB3-Ethernet adapter and the OWC gigabit port.Speed Tests:I included a screenshot of the BMD drive speed test. I ran a small real world test in Premiere with some footage from my bmpcc6k in 6k braw, and I was able to playback footage at full resolution with color grading. It seems promising, but time will tell.360mb/s from OWC onboard TB3 port connected to a Samsung T5250 mb/s from OWC onboard SD card reader from UHS-II v90 chip370 mb/s from OWC onboard TB3 port connected to internal Samsung NVMENOISE:The fan noise was unbearable 30 seconds after turning it on. It has a high quality NOCTUA fan, but the tight chassis causes the air to just be noisy! I unplugged the fan from the little PCB and the device still functions fine and is now nearly dead silent. After using it for about 3 hours, the sides of the enclosure are room temperature, and the rear with all the i/o is also room temperature. It's probably a risk but as an audio person I need silence. I'm not advising anyone to do this, but I did.Overall, I consider it a good buy and recommend it to someone looking to add some decent storage to their kit.

I'm a photographer and I was looking for a RAID storage solution for my photography. I purchased 2 Western Digital 16TB Red Pro from Western Digital. I was looking around for a Thunderbolt 3 RAID enclosure, and this OWC Gemini Dock I thought would work. I'm selling this enclosure after using it for a few months, and it being outside of the return window. There are several issues I've found with this enclosure that I needed to find another direction to go.The first being the loud fan. I thought I could live with the noise, and after a few months, it's too much. I've never had an external drive be so loud. So if your computer work station is in your bedroom, you'll have to listen to the fan all night.Secondly there is no power switch. So at night if you wanted to power down the drives (and consequentially the fan), you have to physically unplug the device. The fan does stop if you power down your computer, but if you put your computer sleep mode the drives and fan will periodically become active during the night.The other issue of not having a power switch is if you unmount the drives, there is no way to mount them again unless you power cycle your computer or the drive itself. I also found that I couldn't mount the drives at times even after restarting either the computer or drive. I couldn't even find the drives using the disk utility. I thought it might be the cord, but I was able to access other devices attached to the enclosure. Not sure what's up with that.For these reasons, I'm cutting my losses and selling this enclosure. I am repurposing the drives in a Synology DS220+ NAS as a backup, which is what I should have done in the first place. Additionally, I'm getting a LaCie 2big Dock 32TB Thunderbolt 3 External HDD purely as storage. I think this will work the best in the long run.

Unit received did not have obnoxious fan noise. There is a newer version of Gemini on the manufacturers website.

I used this to replace a 2010 Mac Pro with a 2021 model Mac Mini with M1. I had 3 requirements; 1) it had to fit the two 3.5 inch hard drives that were in the Mac Pro. 2) it had to have displayport video output to fit the full size displayport to mini-display port adapter on my Apple cinema monitor. 3) it had to be capable of "daisy chaining" thunderbolt ports.This enclosure literally saved me $2000 in additional hardware I would have had to buy for this upgrade ($1600 for Apple display + $200 each for SSD storage). OWC, please do not replace this enclosure with an "upgraded" model.

My new iMac supports Thunderbolt 3, so I wanted to take advantage of this speedy interface for editing photos and video. This OWC dock is indeed very fast once two drives are installed and RAID0 is enabled, but the noise from the dock was unacceptably high for me. I initially thought the fan was the problem, but after some research I found the fan being used is one of the quietest on the market. I found once the outer case was removed, the dock was very quiet. I contacted OWC support to ask them if there was an alternative to this work-around, but two weeks later, and I've heard nothing from them. In any case, I'm happy with the performance and plan to keep the dock, but I'll leave the case off!

An HDMI video port would have made it five stars.

I purchased this thinking it would be a great way to add more disk when I need it and give me the hub functionality I wanted. Within 30 minutes the fan started to howl and squeal but before that it was pretty loud sitting on my desk in a quiet office. Overall, it's a great idea, too bad the execution was so poor.

It worked well to connect additional monitors. However when sitting on the desk to get access to the SD card reader the fan noise (even without drives installed) was so loud it was unusable when on any kind of voice or video call.

Intended to be connected to a PC and not a network via a Eithernet cable