OWC has introduced a new SSD that boasts high capacity and transfer speeds to eliminate any bottlenecks. This is the ACCELSIOR 8M2 PCIe SSD, which can according to OWC, can house up to eight NVMe M.2 SSD units and if it is connected to a PCIe Gen 4 port, it will reach transfer speeds of 26 GB / s.
This model is not far behind if it is used in PCIe Gen 3, since it reaches 12 GB / s. At these speeds, almost any home SSD you can buy today is outmatched.
A large, high-speed, high-capacity SSD, bundling many SSDs
The ACCELSIOR 8M2 PCIe SSD from OWC is not exactly an SSD itself, but an add-in card that fits into a PCIe x16 slot and is capable of stacking up to eight individual SSDs. These SSDs are joined together using the RAID software so that they have the effect of being a single SSD.
The device has been dubbed SoftRAID XT, and OWC claims that the software allows you to create multiple types of RAID arrays, including 0/1/4/5/1 + 0 (10) volumes, without the need for drivers. Only M.2 SSDs with PCI Gen 3 or Gen 4 specifications are supported, so at the processor level, a Zen 2 or 3 from AMD, or an Alder Lake from Intel, will be needed to take advantage of these transfer speeds.
OWC claims that the ACCELSIOR 8M2 PCIe SSD enables 16 streams of 8K ProRes444 in Final Cut Pro X, 8 streams of 12K ProRes444 in Final Cut Pro X, or 9 streams of 4K 16bit EXR in DaVinci Resolve. This would be ideal for creative professionals who must render a lot of videos in their work, but it is just one example of the possibilities it offers. But they advise that the final performance will vary depending on the SSDs used, the speed of the CPU, the RAID configuration and the PCIe version of the system. OWC reported that it used a system valued at about $ 4.300.
