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

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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.

OWC Express 4M2 Thunderbolt 3 Enclosure for 4 x M2 SSD with

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. 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. Other computer peripherals like wi-fi cards can come in the M.2 format and use the dedicated M.2 connector slot, but the most common use for M.2 is SSD data storage, so you can get NVMe drives in the M2 form factor. Macfixit Australia is an Australian owned and operated business based in Melbourne, Victoria and we've been operating since 2005.

If he were building a system now Dave would suggest the fanless version of the Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card (Silent) “especially as the Sonnet M.2 4x4 is now fanless, not that I’ve ever heard the fan in my older version that has a fan”. The Express 4M2 is indeed a non-switched unit that provides only one lane for each M.2 blade, so in a non-RAID environment, the 700MB/s range would be correct. In a RAID 0, 4, or 5 environments the speeds will increase, but not to the 2800MB/s range. RAID 0 should be in the 2200MB/s range for reads. The Thunderblade will approach saturation speeds as a RAID volume, but again if run as a single blade, the speed is reduced.

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

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. 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 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.All four drive bays are bootable on macOS. SSDs with 512-byte sectors require macOS 10.13 or later.

OWC Express 4M2 (0 TB) Four-Slot M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure with

The reason it is set up to one PCIe lane per drive bay is because of Windows. We could update the design to use a PCIe switch, as in the Accelsior 4M2, allowing each drive to get up to four PCIe lanes of performance. The downside is that Windows does not support PCIe switches over Thunderbolt. Some PCs can; many cannot. Until you try it out on your PC, there is no real way of knowing. A third benefit related to performance is the problem of otherwise fast NVMe drives (3000 MB/s) having slow performance in any Thunderbolt enclosure (800 MB/s for write) - since the 4M2 only support PCIe 3.0 x1, the slowness doesn't matter, and software RAID can let you achieve the bandwidth expected of Thunderbolt. The first chassis houses 2 HDX cards and a Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card with 2x 8TB SSD drives for my sound library and project data. If you are looking to push performance to the limit then you are more likely to need to go for a fan-based solution because at peak performance we understand that when these drives and their onboard controllers get hot they can start to throttle performance.

The need to speed, made in USA

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 RAID and Storage Spaces The OWC Express 4M2 comes with SoftRAID Lite XT ready to be set up in RAID 0 performance or RAID 1 mirrored drive mode. So you can customize your Express 4M2 for speed or data redundancy. If you need more options, you can easily upgrade to add extra capabilities and RAID modes to meet any workflow demand. 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.” 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.

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

In the External SSD/NVMe recommendations thread from the DUC Darryl shares that his current preference for a high-performance solution would be to use a “well regarded” NVMe M.2 card in your own portable enclosure. These solutions are based on the combination of a PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure with PCIe NVMe cards inside. But be aware that it would appear that not all PCIe chassis are the same when it comes to how the PCIe lanes are handled. Some split one lane across multiple cards, reducing access to the available bandwidth. You need to make sure that all of the PCIe lanes can be directed to all of the cards in the enclosure to maximise speed and bandwidth, otherwise, your investment in fast NVMe cards may be wasted.So far we have mentioned NVMe drives as being super-SSDs, but you may have also seen the term M.2 drives used in this context. OWC Express 4M2 is limited to ≈750 MB/s (less than 970 MB/s) per NVMe drive since each one is connected as PCIe 3.0 x1