Nvme Enclosures

Dan,

Did you purchase Express 4M2? How's the fan noise? What pros/cons have you experienced? Looking into purchasing one as my editing/media drive for FCPX.

There's also a pretty sweet Envoy FX bus powered drive that recently came out...though max 2TB

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-envoy-pro-fx

I drove there. iMac in the trunk of my little car with some Duvetyne to protect the screen. Carried it to the room at a Residence Inn 50', no big deal. iMacs don't really weigh that much.
So worth it to me to have the screen real estate. Editing with a 13" or 15" screen and that's it? No more for me. Actually lugging the RAID was more of a PITA, in a box with lots of
packing paper to cushion it.

Good feedback, that sounds like it will work well for me. I'm ordering one tonight with the same HP sticks.
 
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Dan,

Did you purchase Express 4M2? How's the fan noise? What pros/cons have you experienced? Looking into purchasing one as my editing/media drive for FCPX.

There's also a pretty sweet Envoy FX bus powered drive that recently came out...though max 2TB

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-envoy-pro-fx

Yes, purchased the 4M2.

Cons:
The fan noise is actually relatively loud, but bearable. I am using it in my home office right now but when I set up my new office,
I may locate the 4M2 under a desk or farther away from my editing station. Also, not having a power switch is lame but you can,
of course, just plug it into a power strip and use the power strip power switch.
This thing is so fast that going back to spinning RAIDs feels like the stone age so if you get one, you'll be spoiled for life

Pros:
It's really small, about 1/4 of the size of my OWC 4 drive RAIDs
It was super easy to build and configure
It's screaming fast, I get around 2800Mbps up and down using the BMD and Aja measuring utilities
It's nice to see the rendering line in FCP X just jam through the rendering so quickly, add on all of the CC, filters, Izotope RX, etc. that you want and the drive just chews through it

So in closing, far from perfect, but the Pros offset the Cons and I'm glad I bought it over a single NVME drive in a housing. I almost bought the Blade but I'm glad I bought this over it
since I can continue to just buy new NVME cards to put into it as the capacities go up and the costs come down.
 
Thanks for the feedback Dan(and JB). Looks like I'll be purchasing an Express M42 with four Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe's $130(unless you think I should also go with the HP's?). No power button isn't a biggie as you mentioned I can have it connected to a power strip. Fan noise was my main concern but sounds manageable in a quiet editing environment, especially having the fan face down and toward the back of my workstation. Are you both using OWC's SoftRAID or Apple's Disk Utility RAID? Speed wise I haven't seen a difference between the two in RAID 0. Although SoftRAID with RAID 5(and soon to support RAID 6) adds redundancy and flexibility.

Being a 3 year product I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with an updated design/fanless version.
 
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How have the 4 sticks of HP EX950 in RAID 0 been working for you guys? Does it get warm/hot or throttle speeds?
 
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