External drive bay for four drives?

There are a lot of four-drive bays out there, but my sense is that you pay more for quality RAID, plus there are other issues with cooling, drive sleep patterns, etc. I don't anticipate needing RAID, and would rather buy an affordable device without capable RAID and later buy a reliable RAID device that costs more if it turns out I need it.

Any recommendations?

I understand what you are saying, but I would think in the long run it would be more economical to just get a dedicated NAS server, like the Synology DS416 that can hold your four drives, instead of buying the two devices as per your statement.

It also comes down to performance, especially for things like streaming HD video or encoding files.

... and since it is also a full-featured server, it can do a lot more than a network device that only offers storage.

To get an idea of what I mean, I suggest that you check out Synology DiskStation Manager

A lot of enclosures for four or more drives that can be used in RAID configurations can also be set to a non-raid configuration, sometimes referred to as JBOD.

JBOD (which stands for "just a bunch of disks") generally refers to a collection of hard disks that have not been configured to act as a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) array.

The Mac Pro late 2013 dark cylinder also has USB-3. It is supported by enough I/O bandwidth so that its can run one device full tilt as fast as USB-3 can run, simultaneously reading and writing.

This means that one USB-3 drive could be used for even the most intensive possible operations.

OR a small handful of USB-3 drives could be used with the understanding that simultaneously reading and writing to multiple drives may occasionally be slightly slowed due to USB-3 bandwidth limitations.

executive summary: you can use some USB-3 drives for "ordinary" uses, but perhaps not for Video Editing in real-time.

Most multi-drive enclosures these days include RAID whether you like it or not, if they do then as others have mentioned you would probably need to use JBOD because it sounds like your four existing drives are of different sizes and converting them to a RAID configuration - even if they were the same sizes would entail reformatting them as well.

Note: Drobo is an external RAID system which unusually does cope with a mixture of different capacity drives. See http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/5d-5Dt/

One possible option - if you can find it would be an external eSATA box, this as the name suggests is external SATA connections and would let you treat them as standard individual drives just as you do now. You would however also need a Thunderbolt to eSATA adapter as well like one of the following.

http://www.kanex.com/thunderbolt-esata

Sonnet - USB 3.0+eSATA Thunderbolt Adapter

Frankly it might be as simple and as cheap to get four external hard drive enclosures with either Thunderbolt2 or USB3 interfaces and treat them as four separate external drives. This would require more power cables but would be a lot simpler and possibly cheaper.

John Lockwood wrote:

Frankly it might be as simple and as cheap to get four external hard drive enclosures with either Thunderbolt2 or USB3 interfaces and treat them as four separate external drives. This would require more power cables but would be a lot simpler and possibly cheaper.

Or a pair of dual-bay enclosures, although they tend to be pricey. These have Thunderbolt and USB 3:

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB 3.1 Gen 1 &... at MacSales.com

I have quite a few external drives and the power cords and clunky adapters are a royal pain if you have more than two hooked up. I shifted to OWC dual bay enclosures (FW800/USB3) for my 2010 Mac Pro. Far less expensive, since they do not have Thunderbolt, and they have performed well. In fact the dual enclosures seem to be a better fit with how later OS versions handle (or fail to handle) external drives.

I think that you are looking for this product :

http://www.materiel.net/dock-pour-disque-dur/icy-box-station-d-accueil-et-de-clo nage-4-baies-ib141clu3-111719.html

Working with a MacPro 2010 for backup only.
Nevertheless, this product is fragile (power button)

Vincent