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

I'm running mostly Samsung 980 Pro M.2 drives in different external Sonnet Thunderbolt 3 expansion chassis-old Sonnet GPU chassis or an Echo Express 3 slot chassis with multiple PCIe to M.2 cards in it.” SoftRAID protects your data by alerting you to issues before anything happens, ensuring you're protected when you're on a critical deadline. SoftRAID rebuilds your RAID in a fraction of the time it would take a hardware RAID to complete the same task, sparing you from significant downtime when you're ready to upgrade or replace a drive.

OWC Express 4M2 4-Slot NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure with SoftRAID OWC Express 4M2 4-Slot NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure with SoftRAID

With these portable solutions, which depend on passive cooling, remember that excessive heat will cause throttling and you won’t get the expected performance. When choosing a portable solution you need to satisfy yourself that the manufacturer has taken the appropriate steps to cool the power-hungry NVMe drives. 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 best solution for a multi-blade system is our Helios 3 paired up with the Accelsior 4M2 PCIe card. This allows full bandwidth to each blade whether it is in a RAID configuration or not. For single blade use, I would highly suggest the Envoy Pro FX or the Envoy Pro SX, these take full advantage of the available bandwidth.” Michael covered his chosen solution for his Mac Pro 7,1 in his article Mac Pro 2019 & Trash Can Processing Power Available Compared - Mac Pro 7,1 & Mac Pro 6,1 Go Head To Head in which he listed the Sonnet M2 4x4 PCI card with four 2TB Samsung EVO 970 M2 cards for VIs. He configured this as an 8TB RAID-0 drive, which has given him speeds of around 6575 MB/s write and 7997 MB/s read. Using a Mac Pro, Michael didn’t need a PCIe enclosure, but it does show the kind of performance you can get from this technology.OWC Thunderbolt 3 Cable OWC Express 4M2 comes with an OWC Thunderbolt 3 cable which is Thunderbolt certified for Mac and Windows, with an additional 0.5 meter to 2.0 meter lengths available separately. Unfortunately, there’s an obscure incompatibility between this drive’s USB 3.0 implementation and the Mac Pro 6,1. Glyph’s engineers worked with me on this and came to the conclusion that it would never work properly on a Mac Pro 6,1. With the release of the new MacBook Pro and Mac Studio, more and more people are looking for even higher speed storage options. In this article, we explore how this has come about, what technology is now available and suggest some options for solutions for your new studio computer. 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. 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.

OWC Express 4M2: Drive Compatibility OWC Express 4M2: Drive Compatibility

It's smaller and easier to fit into your workflow, studio and on stage. It's faster with four easy-access M.2 slots so you can swap, upgrade or expand your Express 4M2 to configure and reconfigure it to serve any project need.

Note: Each SSD uses x 1 lane only. To get the full Thunderbolt 3 supported speed you need to install 4 SSD`s and set it to RAID. Only when fitted with 4 SSD`s together they will run on PCIe 3.0 x 4 lanes. Also, note that smaller size SSD`s are generally slower than higher size SSDs. Mechanisms Supported Slot NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure with SoftRAID. Four easy-to-access M.2 NVMe SSD slots customizable for any workflow with up to 32TB of capacity and up to 2800MB/s performance. If he was building new desktop Thunderbolt storage with M.2 drives, it won’t be dissimilar to what he already uses, but he would go for a larger Sonnet enclosure and a mix of NVMe drives. When it comes to a PCIe enclosure he suggests… The OWC Express 4M2 comes equipped with OWC SoftRAID which provides the amazing capability to RAID across multiple drive enclosures. You can also add more Express 4M2 drives to your storage pool using Windows Storage Spaces. Configure and reconfigure your storage however you need by combining multiple OWC Express 4M2 drives together on Mac and Windows. Connect to Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 Systems with Ease It's smaller and easier to fit into your workflow, studio and on stage. It's faster with four easy-access M.2 slots so you can swap, upgrade or expand your Express 4M2 to configure and reconfigure it to serve any project need. Game-Changing NVMe SSD Performance