Those of you heading out to Las Vegas for the 2012 NAB Show need to stop by the OWC booth #SL14110 to take a gander at the current lineup OWC family of storage and expansion solutions – from your trusty favorites to the newest additions to the fold.
With hard drive and SSD-based solutions up to 2.0TB, it’s no secret that OWC’s portable storage solutions are the go-to models for field use by many film and video professionals who need fast, reliable storage to back up their irreplaceable footage. And when that same footage makes its way to the editing room, our desktop storage solutions, ranging from modular single-drive units to 16TB multi-bay RAID arrays, take up the slack and give you the capacity and speed you’ve come to rely on.
Of course, you can’t rest on your laurels, and so OWC has branched out, introducing more high-end storage systems for professionals, but we’ve also got an eye out for your bottom line.
At CES 2012, OWC introduced our new Jupiter mini-SAS Shared SAN Solution. Since then, we’ve increased bandwidth to an amazing 48Gb/s and capacities up to 3600TB. We think that its amazingly fast throughput and high capacity, makes the OWCs Jupiter mini-SAS a compelling shared storage solution for production studios and broadcast facilities that are striving to meet their growing performance and backup/storage demands with limited budgets. If you want to see just what Jupiter can do for your video workflow, we’ll have a demo unit up and running at our booth.
Of course, the real big announcement at the booth is the OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD Card. It’s the industry’s first Mac-bootable, fully supported PCIe SSD card. We got a brief sneak preview of this card back at CES, but now it’s all official: the Mercury Accelsior offers nearly 3x the performance vs. an SSD in a SATA 2.0 3Gb/s drive bay…and well beyond even 6Gb/s speeds of up to 780MB/s.
Speaking of sneak peeks…
Can you guess what this is?
No? How about the upcoming OWC Thunderbolt PCIe x4 Expander Box!
Essentially, it will allow you to use a PCIe card at up to Thunderbolt speeds when directly connected to a Thunderbolt-equipped computer. Besides a speed boost, the other key benefit to this expander box is now you can utilize PCIe expansion cards with machines like the Mac mini, iMac, and any Mac notebook that previously could not utilize such a card
Such cards include:
– OWC PCIe SSDs (like the aforementioned Accelsior)
– eSATA PCIe cards
– USB 3.0 PCIe cards
– RAID PCIe cards
Now, we know our most ardent followers will want to just jump on this announcement with all sort of questions.
Read this very careful first….we have not done any testing, benchmarking, etc. So there is nothing more we can share with you at this time…including price and availability…other than we hope to make it available sometime during 2012. Therefore, questions specifically regarding this expander box cannot be answered at this time.
Just follow the blog for more developments on this exciting product possibility.
Your patience will be rewarded!
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So is this thing dead or is it coming some time soon?
Not sure which you’re referring to:
* The Jupiter lineup of products are coming soon. They are currently slated to be available by the end of November / early December: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/storage/Enterprise/jupiter/mini-SAS
* The Mercury Accelsior is currently available for shipping: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID
* The OWC Thunderbolt PCIe Expander box got a makeover from its pre-release version and has been released as the OWC Helios: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios/
Agreed on the comment about the LED lights on the Mercury Elite Pro Dual Minis being way too bright. I have my Dual Mini connected to my Mac Mini (HTPC) sitting inside a media cabinet. When I’m sitting on the couch, the Dual Mini is almost at eye level and is distractingly bright. When I have the lights turned down while I’m watching TV at night, the blue lights on the Dual Mini light up half the room. I’ll probably end up disconnecting the LED wires because of this.
Hey What I want is a pci card with a thunderbolt port.. any chance?
Really can’t speak as to the future availability of products.
When will pricing be out on Jupiter? When will it ship?
Pricing and availability is coming soon.
Will this thunderbolt enclosure support video cards? If not, any plans for such? I understand this is likely limited by driver support or OS internals as much as by hardware. Just curious if you had any thoughts about what might be possible along these lines.
I’m sorry but questions specifically regarding this expander box cannot be answered at this time.
The PCIe Thunderbolt expander looks terrific. I assume that the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 2 Port USB 3.0 & eSATA 6Gb/s Host Adapter that you sell would work in it. If you can pair the expander with that card for $199 or less, you would have LaCie beat (their Thunderbolt hub only has esata, which makes it much less useful). Will the expander have a second Thunderbolt connection, so you can daisy chain it?
As shown in the photo, there are two Thunderbolt ports on the back for daisy-chaining of devices.
Surely you don’t think the expander box will sell for $60? The CalDigit card ($140) and the expander box for $199? I’ll be the first one in line!
I will say, there are some huge differences between the CalDigit/Expander box and LaCie. Primarily, the ability to put any card in the box and the fact that the stupid, stupid people at LaCie made theirs 3Gb/s. Also, I don’t think the LaCie version supports port multiplication.
Looks very similar to the mLogic announcement, with slight differences in the casing. Any major differences?
While we typically refrain from commenting on other manufacturer’s similarly appearing products, we are bringing ours to market to support our new OWC Mercury Accelsior SSD; as well to offer support for other PCIe cards (such as USB 3.0 & eSATA) for use in applications where they previously weren’t an option (imac, Mac Mini, MacBook, etc.). Of course, any product we bring to market will be fully backed by OWC’s renowned support…which we like to think is incomparable.
Minor product suggestion … I have a pair of OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual minis. Those bright blue LEDs look garish, and dang are they bright! Can you spec out ‘cool white’ LEDs on new products? Like the ones that are used on the front of the MacBook Pro, and I’ve seen them on G-RAID minis as well.
I know, it’s a silly thing, but to my eye the white/light gray LEDs look more professional.
You guys are able to show thunderbolt designs.
Most excellent!!!
I know you guys have been working hard to get there.
Hopefully your component suppliers are able to get you prices that allow you to offer “consumer” priced thunderbolt solutions instead of the “professional” priced products currently on the market.
While the PCIe box does sound great – the biggest question still remains unanswered:
Where are the external thunderbolt drives?!
They’re coming.
New product looks good.
Would be nice to have a cheaper fanless Thunderbolt option designed for use with OWC’s 2.5″ SSDs that allows for connecting a display via the Thunderbolt enclosure. Also a portable one (perhaps without daisy-chaining) would be nice.
Whilst this wouldn’t be as fast as the PCIe solution it should be cheaper and fast enough for those on a tighter budget.
Man I’m so looking forward to a 2.5″ Thunderbolt enclosure so I can put my 480G SSD into it!
I am glad to hear they are coming. I love your OWC Mercury mini line. Especially the dual drive version.
Since AV content creators need thunderbolt the most – I do hope your raids – especially the portable ones! – will be the first ones to get thunderbolt connectivity – very soon!
G-tech has already said that now their G-RAID with Thunderbolt is out, the G-RAID mini is next (and will be out before the end of this year). I would have loved to hear an announcement like this from OWC since I do prefer your solutions over theirs.
Thanks.
Teases….
So for my home iTunes server, I’m thinking I’ll grab one of those PCIe expander boxes and slap in a mini-SAS card so I can use the Jupiter SAN solution. I think 3600 TB should be enough storage, but do you think 48 Gb/s is fast enough to stream movies?
lawlz :)