Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Inexpensive, speed-limited, and fun storage enclosure

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in Current Mac Hardware edited August 6

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.

Silver rectangular electronic device with rounded edges, a white top, and ports on the front, including USB, SD card slots, and a power button.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Looks like a really tall Mac mini, with a white removable lid.



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.

A silver Apple device, a power adapter, and a silver external hard drive with ports are arranged on a light surface.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Unit, powerbrick, and a Mac mini.



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.

Black hard drive docking station with slots for drives, alongside a white cover displaying a logo on a light surface.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: A pair of hard drives can fit into the top.



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.

Metallic electronic device with a rectangular slot, red RAID switch, two USB ports, power input, and various connection points on the bottom panel.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: The back has a covered M.2 NVMe section.



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.

Silver electronic device with TF and SD card slots, USB ports, circular button, and ventilation grille.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Ports at the front.



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.

Silver electronic device showing two USB ports, a RAID switch, a DC 12V input, a PC-IN port, and ventilation on a white background.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: Rear ports and the RAID switch.



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.

Silver Apple device with rounded edges and black logo on top, ports and vents on front, set against a light surface.
Orico MiniTower 2 Bay RAID review: It could be mistaken for a really tall Mac mini (one included for scale)



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 with code TMINITOWER at checkout, push the enclosure to under $100 through August 27, 2025.



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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    VictorMortimervictormortimer Posts: 268member
    Not sure how 10GBps is in any way a limit when it's got spinning rust boxes in it.
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  • Reply 2 of 7
    KUILIN.WANGkuilin.wang Posts: 1member
    Not sure how 10GBps is in any way a limit when it's got spinning rust boxes in it.
    Yes, you're right about HDDs — but this dock includes an NVMe SSD slot, so users can install a high-speed SSD to fully utilize the 10Gbps bandwidth. It’s designed for both capacity and speed.
    appleinsideruser
     1Like 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 3 of 7
    nzcoolnzcool Posts: 1member
    Maybe you should look at this

    https://www.acasis.com/products/acasis-workstation-40gbps-8-in-1-dock-ssd-enclosure-for-mac-mini-m4?variant=46791239500005
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 4 of 7
    Mike Wuerthelemike wuerthele Posts: 7,254administrator
    Not sure how 10GBps is in any way a limit when it's got spinning rust boxes in it.
    As the text addresses, the SSD that by itself is twice the speed of the interface, the two hard drives, the 10 gigabit USB-A port, and all the rest of the ports are fed by a single 10 gigabit USB-C connection. That's why.
    muthuk_vanalingam
     0Likes 0Dislikes 1Informative
  • Reply 5 of 7
    Mike Wuerthelemike wuerthele Posts: 7,254administrator
    nzcool said:
    Maybe you should look at this

    https://www.acasis.com/products/acasis-workstation-40gbps-8-in-1-dock-ssd-enclosure-for-mac-mini-m4?variant=46791239500005
    I'm testing one now!
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 6 of 7
    entropysentropys Posts: 4,481member
    That acasis looks really really, cool. But not the same use case as this raid storage.
    ive been looking for something like, this to hang off the router for multiple Time Machine backups.
    edited August 6
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  • Reply 7 of 7
    Mike Wuerthelemike wuerthele Posts: 7,254administrator
    entropys said:
    That acasis looks really really, cool. But not the same use case as this raid storage.
    ive been looking for something like, this to hang off the router for multiple Time Machine backups.
    This enclosure as reviewed here, at the sub-$100 price point, would be pretty good for that, especially if you've got a few hard drives hanging about.
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
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