OWC offers new 1U Thunderbolt storage and docking solution
Posted on: Friday 1st of April 2022
OWC – a provider of Memory, External Drives, SSDs, Mac and PC Docking Solutions, Network Attached Storage, and Performance Upgrade Kits – has announced the OWC Flex 1U4 4-Bay Thunderbolt rackmount storage and docking Solution, a professional-grade unit that offers a mix of 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA/SAS and U.2/M.2 NVMe drives in hot-swappable drive bays. The Flex 1U4 allows the connection of gear and charging of mobile devices with its Thunderbolt and USB ports, with the facility to add in audio/video capture, 10Gb Ethernet networking, SSD storage, hardware RAID cards, or I/O card to the PCIe slot as required by the user’s application.
The company calls it “Future Ready”, in that the 1U4 does not lock the user into an “inflexible single-task design”, allowing the addition of new drives, devices, and PCIe cards whenever needed; or simply the expansion of the your storage provision or archiving or redundancy. Ideal for studio or IT room rackmounting, Thunderbolt allows connection to Mac Pro, iMac or Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, PC or notebook; with either custom configuration or off-the-shelf option spec’d by the manufacturer – including options with its own U.2 NVMe SSDs and the OWC ecosystem of U.2 drives and adapters. The 1U4 can support up to 128TB, via 4x OWC U2 Shuttles (16x 8TB NVMe M.2 SSDs). The system also offers full DisplayPort 1.4 capabilities – dependent on host computer support via Thunderbolt 3 connection.
If required, users can make use of included SoftRAID XT RAID management software, which works with macOS and Windows to tailor their backup provision or storage with optimum drive performance. It provides multiple RAID options, validation and verification of drives, and predictive disk failure via its SoftRAID Monitor facility.
