My life is generally Mac and Thunderbolt centric and I’m trying to bring it into the Linux world. The work flow on the Mac goes immediate storage goes onto a 2TB external NVME, then to one of the two drive 4TB drives on my OWC open dock, then moves into a 16TB soft RAID array, and backup is on a 16TB HW raid all are thunderbolt enclosures. The issue I have is that mdam doesn’t work on either my Trixie or 26.04 install so I can’t convert my existing soft RAID to anything readable.
Does anyone know of a 8 bay preferably thunderbolt hardware RAID enclosure that isnt’t 1000 dollars?


No, it 1000% is not, especially in the case of USB that I used. Even in the way Linux handles everything as a file and target, it is vastly different.
Hardware RAID enclosures have batteries on the disk controllers for this very reason. We aren’t talking about those though, we’re talking about software RAID on JBOD, which wouldn’t have those sanity protections. Here’s some random blog explaining deeper.
See above
That’s a filesystem solution to a hardware problem, so yes, probably a bit spoiled there, or at least it’s skewing your understanding of what RAID is and how it works. One of the reasons ZFS exists, actually. It’s nice to have nice things though.