Thursday, June 6th 2024

OWC Brings Slick and Powerful Creator Storage to Computex 2024

OWC brought a host of creator storage solutions to Computex 2024. The company's claim to fame over the past decades has been that their gear is compatible with Macs and iOS devices, although, the current generation is pretty standardized for Macs and Windows PCs. We begin our tour with docking stations—the stuff OWC is good at. The OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock supports the new Thunderbolt Share standard announced by Intel barely a month ago. It plugs into two PCs (or Macs) that support Thunderbolt Share, and enables a fast 40 Gbps network connection between the two, letting you quickly move files and other resources. The dock also allows you to share its various ports, I/O, and card readers among the two connected machines. These connections include two downstream Thunderbolt 40 Gbps, an HDMI display output, a gigabit Ethernet, two 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 type-A, a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 type-C, a USB 2.0, HD audio with 4-pole headset jack, and an SD card reader. The dock has its own internal power supply that drives all its functions.

Next up, is the Express 1M2, a very slick designed USB4-based portable SSD. Internally, the enclosure has an M.2-2280 slot with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 connection, and tested bandwidth as high as 3151 MB/s. A bridge chip connects the M.2 slot to the 40 Gbps USB4 host interface. The actual compartment of the aluminium enclosure with the drive is very slim, much of the body doubles up as a heatsink for the M.2 SSD, there's even some thermal pad and contact points located strategically to make contact with the SSD controller and NAND flash chips. The enclosure supports drives of up to 8 TB in capacity. The range starts from $249 for the 1 TB model.
After that, we ran into the ThunderBlade X8. This desktop portable SSD enclosure packs up to eight M.2-2242 SSDs, for a total of 32 TB of storage, and offers RAID 0/1/4/5/1+0 configurations with them. If you stripe all the drives (RAID 0), you can expect sequential read speeds as high as 2826 MB/s, and sequential writes of up to 2949 MB/s. The device uses a 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3. There are two ports, allowing you to daisy-chain the enclosure with other devices (such as a monitor).

The OWC Envoy Pro Elektron is the latest portable SSD from the Envoy range. The range starts from $99.99 for the 240 GB model, with capacities going all the way up to 4 TB. Inside is an M.2-2242 SSD with PCIe Gen 3 x2 host connectivity; a bridge chip connects this to 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2, with a single cable handling everything.
The Atlas USB4 CFexpress 4.0 Card reader is an interesting device, it connects your machine to a CFexpress 4.0 memory card with zero interface bottlenecks, thanks to its 40 Gbps USB4 interface. The company also showed off an assortment of SD, SDexpress, and CFexpress memory cards under the Atlas brand.
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4 Comments on OWC Brings Slick and Powerful Creator Storage to Computex 2024

#1
LabRat 891
IIRC, OWC primarily focuses on Apple -Pro accessories. They had some of the earliest (mDP PHY) TB1 and TB2 eGPU products on the market.
-Shame... I don't believe eGPU function has been 'worked out' for Apple M-series silicon.
Posted on Reply
#2
bonehead123
Slick looking...

Slow af... (gen 3, bridge chips etc)

Over-hyped..

Overpriced...

Seems like OWC has all it's usual bullet points covered... gotta keep them margins up there with the fruity bois :(
Posted on Reply
#3
Chaitanya
LabRat 891IIRC, OWC primarily focuses on Apple -Pro accessories. They had some of the earliest (mDP PHY) TB1 and TB2 eGPU products on the market.
-Shame... I don't believe eGPU function has been 'worked out' for Apple M-series silicon.
Not anymore, they still do have CrApple specific overpriced crap but they do have products for broad range of applications. Their Memory cards, readers and enclosure are very reasonably priced and well made products.
Posted on Reply
#4
ypsylon
Great design (I'm very blue biased guy ;) ), awesome products, which don't last very long, sadly...

Unfortunately OWC is extremely overpriced given fail rate I've experienced and keeping clear of them now.
Posted on Reply
Jul 15th, 2024 23:31 EDT change timezone

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