Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Looks like a really tall Mac mini, with a white removable lid.
The Orico MiniTower is a fun, two-bay RAID enclosure to boost your desktop Mac storage inexpensively. It’s just too bad that it’s limited to 10 gigabit USB-C speed.
Since the dawn of SCSI, and even before with a hard drive with a floppy drive connector around the same time that the Mac 512k shipped, external mass storage has been de rigeur on Mac. The fees Apple has always, always charged for storage upgrades are disproportionately high, to the point that we recommended using external upgrades.
External drives and network-attached storage devices often save a significant amount of cash, compared to Apple’s pricey capacity upgrades.
On the lower-middle end of low-capacity dock enclosures is the Orico MiniTower. It tries to balance port addition, the high capacity of local two-bay direct attached storage, with speed of access of SSDs.
Though it has its limitations, it’s extremely useful. And relatively cost-effective.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Design
Much like the introduction of the Mac Studio as a really tall Mac mini when it first came out, the Orico MiniTower could be thought of the same way. It is a rounded square cylinder made from a similar-colored aluminum — and it looks like a tall cousin to Apple’s M4 Mac mini.
They even brand it for the new Mac mini. It works on anything with USB-C, though.
There are differences, such as the white top, but it does fit into the same footprint as a modern M4 Mac mini. There’s even a circular “foot” to the storage device, which sucks air in before it is expelled out through the rear vent.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Drives
The top lid lifts off to reveal the two slots for inserting a pair of drives, using a pair of sleds. Unusually, the drives mount vertically with enough of a gap for airflow to take place.
These two bays can hold a pair of 3.5-inch hard drives. The company says that it will support two 24TB drives, for up to 48GB in total. We ran 26TB drives in there, and it was fine.
The rear has a cover that hides an M.2 NVMe interface, which can take just about any NVMe drive size. This can be up to 8TB in capacity.
Taking the two drive bays and the M.2 into account, you can insert up to 56TB of storage into the device, according to the company. Orico refers to this as “Hot and Cold” data partitioning, in that the “hot” SSD provides fast data access while the “cold” spinning metal is intended for mass storage and longer-term data retention.
There’s no software to automatically spread this out, as you’d expect from this price point. So, that’s a manual process.
The unit has RAID 0 and RAID 1 hard drive configurations, selectable by a switch on the rear of the unit. These work as you’d expect. That said, the Mac Disk Utility can do the same thing, and I recommend that instead.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Connectivity and limitations
Around the front are SD memory card slots, a USB 2.0 port, a USB 3.2 Type-A port rated at 10Gbps, and a power button. At the back is the USB-C port for connecting to the Mac mini, as well as a pair of USB 2.0 ports for keyboards or headphones, a RAID button for configuring the RAID setup, and a power-in connection.
You’ll notice that there’s only one USB 3.2 Type-A port on the unit and a bunch of slower USB 2.0 ports. This is a hint to one of the few limitations of the drive, namely it is hamstrung somewhat by limited bandwidth.
The sole USB-C port, intended as the upstream connection to a nearby Mac mini, means there’s only a maximum total bandwidth available of 10Gbps. That is split across all of the ports, memory card slots, and the drives.
This is more than enough bandwidth for the hard drives. It’s when you start slamming the ports and the SSDs, you start running into speed limits, quick.
We have talked about this with other devices. USB4 chipsets are relatively cheap, and would allow for more bandwidth. This is a fun case and hub, it’s a shame that USB4 wasn’t used.
This is only a problem if you are doing a lot of data transfers using the Orico MiniTower. Most typical users won’t really run into this issue that often.
Power users will quickly find it to be limiting.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Enough power and speed for the price
The Orico MiniTower is a fun attempt at providing Mac users more desktop storage in a value-focused package. A $129 retail price for the unit without drives makes for a pretty good price-to-performance standpoint, and it is a good — but not excellent — candidate for casual users who need more capacity.
Make no mistake, it’s bandwidth-challenged. Those who have to have USB4 or Thunderbolt speeds should look elsewhere.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID pros
- Compact size for storage
- Inexpensive and almost always on sale
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID cons
- 10 gigabit speed ceiling is the main, inescapable drawback
- The ports could be labeled a lot better
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I’ve reviewed dozens of storage enclosures. Maybe a hundred at this point. Some have been super-fast, and some are on the slower side, like this one. The Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID is just fun.
If this were a $200 USB4 enclosure, this is a 4.5 out of 5 for everybody. For me, and most of the AppleInsider audience with prosumer needs, verging on enterprise sometimes, it’s just too slow.
For casual home storage needs, it’s perfect.
Where to buy the Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID
The Orico MiniTower is available from Amazon, priced at $119.99. At publication time, a pair of stacking discounts push the enclosure to under $100.
