OWC is shipping its ThunderBay Flex 8 media workflow solution, revealed at CES 2020. The Thunderbolt 3 storage solutions is designed for media professionals with the goal of helping them handle their storage, connectivity, and PCIe expansion needs.
Larry O’Connor, OWC founder and CEO, says you can fix three bugs with one line of code and turn your Mac into a supercomputer with this highly configurable workhorse for high-end video, VFX, on-set DIT, and finishing work. It’s blazing fast storage, a dock, and PCI expansion combined into a next gen form factor, he adds, noting that features include:
° Eight drive bays: maximize 3.5” SATA/SAS1 bays for up to 128TB of capacity;
° Ttop four bays can alternately use U.2 SSDs and you can create a hybrid config with real world speeds up to 2750 MB/s;
° You can design your RAID config to your exact specs with SOFTRAID
° You can Connect more: (1) USB-C and (2) USB-A 10Gb/s ports for peripherals and mobile devices; DisplayPort 1.4 for connecting up to an 8K display
° Front-side SD 4.0 and CFexpress card readers with up to 985MB/s speed
° A econd Thunderbolt 3 port for daisy chaining devices or additional display(s);
° One PCIe slot for audio/video capture, networking, SSD storage, hardware RAID card, or I/O card.
OWC suggests four sample configurations:
° Flex 8 DIY Enclosure: add your own drives and PCIe card for the flexibility to configure, and reconfigure;
° Flex 8 HDD: for RAW, 4K, large format, and VR workflows. Arrives pre-set with RAID 5 speed and protection;
° Flex 8 – 4 SSD x 4 HDD; a high-capacity SSD RAID 0 project drive for large-format, multi-stream workflows along with an HDD RAID 5;
° Flex 8 – 1+7: ingest and edit live on a U.2 SSD or use the drive as a swappable transport for fast lab processing while being able to edit and store entire projects on the ultra-capacity HDD RAID 5 array.
The ThunderBay Flex 8comes with SoftRAID for Mac and Windows. It’s designed to make RAID creation easy by allowing you to configure your preference of speed, size, and/or redundancy for your volume and start working.
Right out of the packaging, all eight bays can utilize SATA 6Gb/s 2.5-inch SSDs or 3.5-inch HDDs. The top four bays are NVMe U.2 SSD ready which means your ThunderBay Flex 8 will be future proofed against whatever future workflow the world throws at you.
The ThunderBay Flex 8 is compatible with the OWC u.2 NVME interchange System (sold separately). This allows you to keep your Flex 8 on set as you swap your drives to and from post with easy to transport containers that prevent costly wear and tear on your unit.
The ThunderBay Flex 8 integrated storage, docking and PCIe expansion solution is now available at MacSales.com and other online retailers, from 0GB enclosure (add your own drives) or from 16TB to 128TB solutions. Pricing starts at US$1,199.
