OWC Announces Accelsior 4M2 NVMe Storage Solution with up to 6 GB/s Transfer Rates

[btarunr]

OWC today announced the all-new Accelsior 4M2 ultra high-performance PCIe M.2 NVMe internal SSD that delivers over 6,000 MB/s real-world speeds in capacities up to 8 TB. The Accelsior 4M2 is the fastest SSD ever built by OWC and is the perfect storage solution for large format video editing, VR/AR/MR environments, extreme gaming, compute-intensive applications and other high bandwidth needs.

Whether you have the Mac Pro 2019, a Mac Pro 2012 or 2010, or PC tower, the Accelsior 4M2 delivers the blazing performance, unstoppable reliability and stunning versatility that are the hallmarks of OWC's brand reputation. As a half-length x8/x16 compatible card, this game-changer offers true versatility, so users can install it in full-length PCIe 3.0 or 2.0 slots as well. Even Thunderbolt 3-equipped laptops can experience the performance boosting benefits of Accelsior 4M2 with Plug-and-Play ease using the OWC Mercury Helios 3S PCIe expansion chassis (sold separately). In other words, it's incredibly versatile.



Insane Performance
Accelsior 4M2 was designed to address each of its four NVMe blade style drives at full x4 PCIe speeds, so whether users are running a single drive on the Accelsior 4M2 or running four in JBOD, each drive has the capability to run at full speed. Oh, and if over 6,000 MB/s of real-world speed and 8 TB of capacity isn't enough to meet the task, users can RAID two Accelsior 4M2 cards together to experience out of this world exponential performance. With NVMe SSDs powering its heartbeat, Accelsior 4M2 offers the fastest data rates ever delivered by an OWC SSD. In other words, it's insanely fast.

Easy and Complete Drive Health Monitoring, TRIM, and Performance Management
Accelsior 4M2 includes SoftRAID Pro to ensure you get the maximum, steady performance, protection and monitoring against drive failure, and plug and play simplicity. SoftRAID is the only solution with robust drive health monitoring and reporting capabilities and full TRIM support for attached external and PCIe slot NVMe drives under MacOS. SoftRAID's easy setup makes it customize storage to the RAID volume(s) your applications need by helping you through the entire process. Ready to go Plug-and-Play or just decide what you're use requirements are for desired RAIDs and how much space to allocate to it. It's that simple to create your preference of speed and/or redundancy attributes of your data volume.

Change Your Reality
Accelsior 4M2 offers performance gains in so many diverse ways that it will literally change the paradigm for storage applications. For 4K and 8K video and VR environments it allows streaming and editing without a glitch, plus faster previews, renders, and processing in VFX programs. Keep page scenery and textures looking sharp and flowing uninterrupted in virtual reality environments and ensure augmented reality visualizations look life-like. Hard core gamers can change game levels seamlessly and play flight/driving/MMO games with continuously changing scenery and heavily personal preference modded games without micro-stuttering.

Highlights

• Supercharges Macs and PCs - ideal for Mac Pro 2019, Mac Pro 2012 or 2010, and PC towers
• Work faster - over 6,000 MB/s real-world speed in RAID 0
• OWC Aura P12 powered solutions - advanced PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMe Technology
• Store more - store up to 8 TB of critical footage, images, files and games
• Bootable - start working in seconds
• Slot-powered - no extra power cables needed
• Includes SoftRAID: robust software for TRIM, healthy monitoring and custom creation and management of advanced RAID sets
• Deployment ready - pre-configured solutions undergo performance verification
• Silent cooling - finned heat sink cover for fan-less operation
• Highly versatile - installs into a full-height, half-length x8 or x16 PCIe 3.0 or 2.0
• Plug and Play - no drivers needed
• Worry-free - up to 5-year OWC Limited Warranty

Pricing & Availability
The Accelsior 4M2 SSD is available now for pre-order at MacSales.com in capacities from 0 GB (add your own drives) starting at $249.99, or from 1 TB to 8 TB starting at $519.99. It will begin shipping the week of December 30th.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[AKBrian]

For anyone else wondering how they were able to successfully engineer a quad NVMe M.2 card with such slow speeds and such high costs, it uses an ASMedia 2824 PLX chip to route four PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes through a PCIe 3.0 x8 connector to the motherboard. Cards like the Hyper M.2 and others act as simple direct lane extensions with PCIe redrivers.

ASMedia Preps ASM2824 PCIe 3.0 Switch

www.anandtech.com

 

[notb]

For anyone else wondering how they were able to successfully engineer a quad NVMe M.2 card with such slow speeds and such high costs, it uses an ASMedia 2824 PLX chip to route four PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes through a PCIe 3.0 x8 connector to the motherboard. Cards like the Hyper M.2 and others act as simple direct lane extensions with PCIe redrivers.

But the Hyper M.2 card requires a full-length x16 slot and this one doesn't. That's the whole point of this product.

 

[W1zzard]

What's the cheapest similar option that has a PCIe bridge chip onboard?

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

What's the cheapest similar option that has a PCIe bridge chip onboard?

I'd check out Highpoint Storage, they have numerous cards like this. I personally own their SSD7103 which is a 4x M.2 RAID adapter with a full pcie 3.0x 16 link that has hardware RAID 0/1/10/5/50 Capability and is Bootable. But they have numerous variations of them, U.2 adapters all all sorts of storage items you wouldn't find many other places. The link is below:

Home | HighPoint Technology Inc.

Founded in 1995, HighPoint delivers the industry's most comprehensive selection of RAID storage and connectivity solutions for NVMe, Thunderbolt, SAS/SATA and USB interfaces. Over the last three decades, HighPoint has successfully deployed an extensive range of products and services to Fortune...

highpoint-tech.com

 

[W1zzard]

I'd check out Highpoint Storage, they have numerous cards like this. I personally own their SSD7103 which is a 4x M.2 RAID adapter with a full pcie 3.0x 16 link that has hardware RAID 0/1/10/5/50 Capability and is Bootable. But they have numerous variations of them, U.2 adapters all all sorts of storage items you wouldn't find many other places. The link is below:

Home | HighPoint Technology Inc.

Founded in 1995, HighPoint delivers the industry's most comprehensive selection of RAID storage and connectivity solutions for NVMe, Thunderbolt, SAS/SATA and USB interfaces. Over the last three decades, HighPoint has successfully deployed an extensive range of products and services to Fortune...

highpoint-tech.com

Hmm.. cheapest option seems to be around 400 bucks .. too much

 

[E-curbi]

For some unexplainable reason OWC’s play on words/letters “Accelsior” rolling around in my head, simply doesn’t work all that well, excelsior + accelerate is not all that clever for a product title, kinda blatantly unclever on a scale of magnitude in my humble opinion. lol

If OWC can offer this drive in 0GB empty capacity - enclosure only - why can’t they do the same with the Thunderblade external?

I’ll take two Thuderblade empty enclosures please, and load them up with Optane gen 2 drives. An impressive storage solution migrating from USB 3.0 to USB 4.0 (Thunderbolt 3) external desktop for year 2021.

That gorgeous passive OWC Thunderblade heatsink has Physics 2 with Calculus in the front row written all over it.

 

[kapone32]

I like the fact that it has a PLX chip on the PCB. You could actually use this with AM4 based boards and see the performance level of the X399 PCI_E speeds.

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

I've seen these expansions for M.2 on Ebay.

It would technically be cheaper to buy two Samsung 4TB SSD for $450 a piece (right now).

I finalize my 4 and 8K videos using Crucial MX500 2TB drives adding up to 10TB.

So long as you edit from SSD -to-SSD the transfer rates are still extremely fast.

It's only when you work on the HDD that things slow down.

A Core i9 also helps speed considerably.