OWC today announced the Accelsior 8M2, which it claims is the densest, fastest commercial SSD ever to grace Earth's shores. Is it one of the best SSDs? Perhaps not, as the 8M2 features a PCIe add-in card design with an x16 connection and is geared toward Mac Pro desktops.
Most NVMe solutions make do with an x4 PCIe interface, via an M.2 or U.2 connector. The Accelsior 8M2 PCIe add-in card features a total of eight individual NVMe M.2 SSD slots, all running at their full x4 lanes of data throughput. The company announced drive compatibility with macOS 11 Big Sur, M1 Macbooks, Windows 10, and Linux systems.
But with great power comes an even greater price-tag: the densest, 64 TB configuration (8x 8TB SSDs) will set users back a cool $12,999. That's actually the cheapest price per GB of the bunch, at 'only' $0.20 per GB. The 2TB model featuring eight 240GB drives is actually the highest cost for the available storage at $0.68 per GB.
The PCIe add-in card has a thin, light, and relatively long design. It has an integrated heatsink and active fan, no doubt a requirement for a product that pairs eight separate NVMe drives under the same heatsink. OWC opted for a no-frills aesthetic, with dashes of blue in both the PCB and I/O plate. An additional 6-pin PEG power connector supplements the PCIe slot's power delivery, yielding a potential 150W of combined power.
OWC is quick to point out the performance fluidity one can expect from the absolutely gargantuan throughput. The company says that the Accelsior 8M2 is able both edit and playback 16 simultaneous streams of 8K ProRes444 content "without a glitch." The extreme performance should reduce the time to completion on any storage-dependant workload, bringing about increased productivity, efficiency, and even power savings.
OWC says the Accelsior 8M2 features support for RAID 0/1/4/5/1+0 (10) with Macs, as well as RAID 0/1 for Windows machines via SoftRAID. A plethora of software and firmware solutions were designed to work in tandem to guarantee the Accelsior performs volume validation, error correction, and disk checks.
The OWC Accelsior 8M2 SSD is available now in capacities ranging from 0TB (where you add your own drives) starting at $799. Different storage densities have been announced at 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB, 32TB and 64TB, with prices starting at $1,299 for the 2TB model and reaching the aforementioned $12,999 for the 64TB model, but you might get them for less with an OWC promo code. OWC appears to use its own Aura P12 Pro M.2 drives on the various capacities it offers. Included with any purchase is a free, one-year license to Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office software suite. The Accelsior 8M2 SSD is covered by a five-years limited warranty.
