- Description
- Specifications
Eight Bays, Your Drives, Your RAID Software
A shoot wraps with four hundred gigabytes of footage and the edit bay is already full. Rather than buying another sealed appliance, this configuration hands over the chassis and lets the drives be someone else's decision: eight bays that accept any mix of 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch HDDs and SSDs over SATA/600, connected to the workstation on a single Thunderbolt 3 cable at 40Gb/s. OWC ships this kit as JBOD with no RAID software bundled, so the array is built with whatever the studio already runs. Compare it against the rest of the data storage range at Island Electrical Supply.
How It Works
Out of the box the enclosure presents its eight bays as JBOD, meaning each drive appears individually to the operating system. Layering RAID on top is a software decision: OWC SoftRAID handles RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, and 1+0, while Apple RAID and Microsoft Disk Manager are both supported for teams that would rather use what ships with the OS. Because SoftRAID is not included in this kit, buyers already holding a license avoid paying for a second one. The second Thunderbolt 3 port passes the connection along, so up to five more ThunderBay 8 units or other Thunderbolt devices can daisy-chain from the first.
Highlights
- Up to 2586 MB/s real-world throughput, enough headroom for multi-stream 8K editing and AR/VR workflows.
- Eight tool-free bays that mix 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch, HDD and SSD, in any combination.
- Cross-platform support spanning macOS Mojave through Sequoia, Windows 10 and 11, and Windows Server 2022.
- Front panel lock with two security keys supplied, plus an active cooling fan in a 16.09 lb desktop chassis.
- Ships with a 0.7 m Thunderbolt cable and US power cable, covered by a one-year OWC limited warranty.
