Thunder bay 4 is VERY noisy

Unless your Thunderbay 4 is defective, or you have an extremely noisy drive in it, we do nto find they are excessively noisy. All 4 disk enclosures will make some noise from the fans and the rotating disks, and the head seek noises, which is what you are objecting to, are always going to be noticable.

I don't know of any enclosure that would be significantly quieter. If you can find one, you are welcome to post your solution.

Mark from SoftRAID suggests that it is possible that it is OSX's Spotlight indexing that is causing the noise (due to lots of short random access seeks).

Unfortunately, I have "broken" the volume, and am writing zeros to the drives (which is silent!). I will re-create the RAID volume and again copy my files to the Thunderbay. Then I'll turn off indexing to see if that's the problem. I'm a little skeptical, as there is not much noise except when I am accessing the drive directly. Will post my results.

Thanks to advice from Mark James, I've re-created my SoftRAID volume, and things are working well (enough, or at least better). I found that Windows 10 is a cause of some of the noise. I run Parallels on my Mac to run Windows 10 for certain apps. Some Windows 10 services do generate a lot of activity (and noise) even when I am not doing anything actively. I turned off many of these services (see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-tips-fix-100-disk-usage-improve-windows-performance/) and things are better.

On the other hand, when not using Parallels or Windows, just Mac OS X (El Capitan), I am still getting quite a bit of noise from disk seeking, just by moving files from one folder on the RAID volume to another. I am somewhat surprised that moving files requires them to be COPIED. Normally, on a regular hard drive, moving files would be just a directory operation. All I did was drag and drop a few (large) folders from one folder on the RAID value to another.

So, the question now is, why does MOVING files from one folder to another require them to be COPIED?

Re: copying files... Permissions/ownership issue. You can disable ownerships on the volume, or set the global ownerships for the main folder. This is a "Finder" issue.

Re: copying files... Permissions/ownership issue. You can disable ownerships on the volume, or set the global ownerships for the main folder. This is a "Finder" issue.

I'm sure you're right, but I don't know how to fix this issue. I did Get Info on the drives and the folders, and ensured everyone had Read+Write. No change. Every file move becomes a copy operation.

Note: at one point I had tried to create the volume as encrypted, but as you know this option is not/no longer supported in SoftRAID, so I had to recreate the volume as unencrypted. Is it possible something is "stuck" in the wrong mode? If so, how can I fix it?

I attach a screenshot (from Disk Utility) with Info on my 12TB volume.

Thanks for your help.

By the way, I've used Get Info to change permissions on some folders and files, and it appears to work ... sometimes. Is there a way to globally change the permissions on all files and folders and subfolders all at once?

Do you know about the option in the get info dialog to "perform on all enclosed items"?

Yes, sorry. That option is greyed out. BUT .. I just noticed I could unlock that option with the system password, and have done so. Sorry about all the apparent newbie questions, I'm really not a newbie. Just a little slow today!

Thanks for your help. All is good now!

Ken