Moving from Catalina to Windows 11

Thunderbay 6 which has TB3 ports seems to be okay. But optimistically I tried to connect a Thunderbay IV with TB2 ports via an apple TB2-TB3 adapter and it doesn't work/isn't recognized.

It's not a biggee, but I have several of these TB2 thunderbays that could finally get a second life lying around.

@chobochobo 

I checked and the issue is Thundewrbolt 2 was not well supported by Windows, that is the issue. Sorry.

Cheers.

If I move to windows, should I keep my main file store on a Thunderbay flex 8 as apple format, relying on windows softraid 8 to read-write. Or, should I convert it to NTFS please? I can move the data over to other thunderbays and back again, it'll take a while but it's do-able if there are long term benefits.  But then I won't be able to write to the NTFS from my mac. Hmm, thinking time.

I shouldn't consider EXFAT right?

@chobochobo 

ExFat is a file transfer file system, not a "working" file system, so no, do not use it.

You can use NTFS, but you need to have a driver like paragon on the Mac side.

HFS generally works well on both, unfortunately you were having issues in your configuration.

Recently I bought one of these 'NAS' machines - an Aoostar WTR Max. It's basically a AMD miniPC with 6 drive bays (and 5 NVME m2 drive) bays, so I guess it's like having a big ATX windows machine with multiple internal drives. How is softraid going to behave here if I make RAID 4 or 5 using these drives please? I know that Softraid isn't safe/good for USB enclosures, but will it be okay here (and also non-OWC enclosures) please?

@chobochobo 

It should be fine, as long as the computers drive system is reliable. You don't even need to reconfigure the RAID volume if you don't want to, although you will want to use the larger Stripe unit size for better performance.