Proper way to unmount and shutdown Thunderbay 8 on a Mac Studio

If you are shutting down, you do not need to power off the enclsure, it uses so little power in standby, nothing to worry about.

What I recommend is unmount your volume, wait 30 seconds, then shut down. this gives the drives lots of time to flush their memory to disk.

but there are lots of ways of shutting down. But giving the drives time to save their memory is the most important of all the tips.

When I do not need to use the thunder bay, I unmount it, wait 30 seconds, but at this point it is still plugged into the Mac (via thunderbolt cable), it is drawing power, making the typical noises (grinding, spinning, thumping, etc., ), do I unplug it from the Mac or do I turn it off?

I'm still using my computer but not the thunder bay.

Here are the reasons why I am asking.....

I had everything up and running and had a software conflict (I guess with Wacom Tablet drivers and somona software) and everything on my computer froze (hanged), couldn't break the freeze, so I unfortunately had to shut down the power to the computer. This was not good at all for all my apps that were open and especially for the thunderbay,..... it made a terrible noise and then when the computer was rebooted 2 of the drives gave errors and it would not mount. It was not in the finder to even try to unmount, so only option at this point was to unplug the thunder bay from the Mac, that didn't seem like the proper option either as the thunder bay (made more noise when doing so) and it apparently draws a lot of power from the Mac. When I unplugged it from the Mac the thunder bay basically lost almost all power (it seemed that way), nothing but orange lights are illuminated.    I plugged it back into the Mac and after a few minutes the thunder bay/raid mounted like normal. 

So what is the proper way to disconnect the thunder bay from a Mac after I unmount it from the finder when I do not need to use it??

I am used to having a raid (Drobo). I could unmount it from my Mac, unplug its thunderbolt cable from the Mac and all was good. when I needed it use it I would plug the thunderbolt back into the computer and it would mount and I could work on the files on the raid.......

This OWC/Softraid seems to be a little different, so that's why I am asking for specifics on the unmount and unplug..... I'm just trying to do things the correct way to avoid any issues.

Thank you!

I appreciate the help.

@ilzho 

No problem. You can either unplug it, or power it off. There is no difference as far as reliability goes. Just make sure you donot unplug it until a couple minutes after unmounting it, as disks can take a while to save their cache and MacOS only tells the disks to do this one disk at a time, so it can take a while to complete (up to 2 minutes!)

Whether you power off the enclosure, or just unplug the cable is not really significant.