OWC Express 4M2 (0 TB) Four-Slot M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure with SoftRAID XT, Up to 2800MB/s, Four M.2 NVMe SSD bays, Add up to 32TB of storage

Product Information

The Express 4M2 enclosure only works with NVMe (PCIe 3.0) SSDs. SATA M.2 drives will not function if installed. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a hyper-efficient communications interface protocol built from the ground up to properly take advantage of SSD technology and high-performance connection buses like PCIe. The result is exponentially faster and efficient SSD storage, and the OWC Express 4M2 has room for four NVMe SSDs. DisplayPort

OWC Express OWC Express

You like to explore your own independent path, and digital storage is where you have fun, push hard and spark the imagination. You explore, you refine, and when ready, you share your vision with the world. The OWC Express 4M2 is the external drive built for the journey before you and the path yet to be explored. Size: at least 6TB single volume size (without resorting to exotic software RAID solutions that group smaller volumes together).Silence: so I could use this storage in the same room as the Mac Studio and not be forced to run long cables into my basement machine room. You may have noticed that virtually none of the people we have featured has chosen to use an OWC product. We were surprised at this as OWC has a very good reputation for so many Mac and Storage related products. OWC claims that the P12 can hit read/write speeds of 3.4GBps and 3GBps respectively (and individually) which should be more than enough for each channel. While the maximum theoretical speed of Thunderbolt 3 is 5GBps but in reality, this number is never reached due to overhead. They accept a maximum of 4x NVMe drives, can run as RAID 0/1/4/5 & 10 or JBOD or Span. Maximum transfer speed is quoted as 2800MB/s, so not too bad in comparison to internal storage. We already have a broader article SSDs And Storage Drives For Your Studio - Everything You Need To Know. In that article, we cover all kinds of drives from HDDs (spinners) to SSDs (solid-state drives). However, as we explained in that article, there are SSDs and SSDs.

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Each computer has a Sonnet Echo III chassis attached and together they are configured side by side in the DuoModo housing.The fastest that Thunderbolt 3 or 4 will actually move data at is around 2800MB/s for data reads. This is due to the reserved bandwidth for video. With the advice of colleagues, I looked at the landscape of available NVMe Thunderbolt drives that don’t require PCIe slots or a PCIe chassis. Glyph Technologies makes two 8TB bus-powered NVMe drives. They’re silent, expensive and fast. The OWC Express 4M2 is designed with superior ease-of-use in mind. OWC worked with award-winning creatives and listened to the kudos they heaped onto the OWC ThunderBay mini, and they put all that shared knowledge to good use when they set out to build the next-gen Thunderbolt 3 multi-bay drive. The result is the 57% smaller and 2.5x faster OWC Express 4M2. As for the Express 4M2, it remains, as far as I know, the only such product on the market. It is unique in that it allows four drives to be merged together in a virtual disk. It manages to hit the right balance of performance AND storage. There are cheaper single drive devices available but of much lower capacity. The Samsung X5 comes to mind. On top of that it is small and can be daisy-chained (and hot-swapped) for even more flexibility. We would have preferred a longer cable, a longer warranty and multiplexed to fully benefit from faster NVMe SSD.