Last year I went hands-on with a few Akitio Thunderbolt 3-enabled drive enclosures for 9to5Mac, but none of the previous enclosures came with out-of-the-box support for macOS. Instead, users had to rely on a hack in order to enable support for these enclosures, due to the fact that macOS wasn’t compatible with the Thunderbolt 3 chipsets being used.
In today’s world, things are a bit different. Much of the Thunderbolt 3 hardware shipping today is no longer “Windows only”, which is a great thing for recent MacBook Pro and Mid-2017 iMac hardware with Thunderbolt 3 I/O capabilities.
Akitio’s just-released Thunder3 Quad Mini is one such example of Thunderbolt 3-enabled hardware made with the Mac in mind. This four-bay enclosure comes with two Thunderbolt 3 ports in a small aluminum enclosure that supports passive cooling for noiseless operation. In other words, it’s a quiet enclosure that’s perfect for RAID 0r SSD setups for maximum speed. Have a look at our hands-on video
