My life is generally Mac and Thunderbolt centric and I’m trying to bring it into the Linux world. The work flow on the Mac goes immediate storage goes onto a 2TB external NVME, then to one of the two drive 4TB drives on my OWC open dock, then moves into a 16TB soft RAID array, and backup is on a 16TB HW raid all are thunderbolt enclosures. The issue I have is that mdam doesn’t work on either my Trixie or 26.04 install so I can’t convert my existing soft RAID to anything readable.
Does anyone know of a 8 bay preferably thunderbolt hardware RAID enclosure that isnt’t 1000 dollars?
There’s a few things at work here:
- Not much “hardware” RAID anymore because offloading works just fine and doesn’t draw excessive resources.
- It sounds like you want to just take your existing disks and pop them into something else, which won’t work.
- You shouldn’t be running RAID over any external connections for a number of reasons if the coordinator (your machine) is hosting it. I can go deeper into that if you want.
You want a self-contained NAS that manages its own RAID and disks. I would honestly just get a diskless unit and start clean. You’ll be better off in the long run.
I don’t want a NAS I want an 8 bay hardware RAID DAS
Link me to a single hardware controlled disk array that you’re considering.
Also software. Literally in the description and options.
There are very few use cases for hardware controllers anymore, and they are on SAN controllers at a massive scale. Every single device you point me to at under $50k is going to be software.
Just wanted to clarify so you understand.
mdam doesn’t work on either my Trixie or 26.04 install
What? Do you mean it is incompatible with Mac OS software RAID implementation? This does not mean it doesn’t work. You will also be unable to read your software RAID if you insert disks into hardware RAID device.

