New product
Since the launch of the OWC ThunderBay desktop storage line in 2014, computer users across the planet have continued to fall in love with it. They embrace its massively powerful RAID capacity and intense performance fueled by time-tested OWC reliability. Its appeal skyrocketed when it was infused with industry-first FLEXibility to create ThunderBay Flex 8.
Now businesses, institutions, studios, and creatives can go beyond the desktop with the OWC Flex 1U4. This innovative 4-bay rackmount solution is ready to fuel your endeavors with the best combination of storage capacity, Thunderbolt transfer performance, drive flexibility, and device expandability. With FLEX in its name, you can count on the OWC Flex 1U4 to be your rackmount workflow game-changer.
You’ll turn your expandability and connectivity dreams into reality when you add the OWC Flex 1U4 to your rack or cart. Use a mix of 2.5 or 3.5-inch SATA/SAS and U.2/M.2 NVMe drives with four quick-access, hot-swappable drive bays. Connect mixers, keyboards, cameras, and other gear to your heart's content as well as charge mobile devices with an ample variety of Thunderbolt and USB ports. Add up to an 8K display via DisplayPort. And when you have a custom capture, recording, networking, or storage need, the OWC Flex 1U4 lets you install a PCIe card to conquer specialized tasks.
When your workflow needs change, the FLEXpandability of the OWC Flex 1U4 easily adapts. Add new drives, connect different devices, and install a half-length full-height single-width PCIe x16 card of your choice like a 10Gb Ethernet networking card or the blistering fast OWC Accelsior 4M2 SSD for expanded performance storage capacity. By not locking you into an inflexible single-task design, the OWC Flex 1U4 extends its useful life and maximizes your investment well into the future.
The OWC Flex 1U4 is like a bolt-in productivity supercharger for new or existing rack environments powered by a rack Mac Pro, rack PC, MacBook Pro, PC notebook, or even a Mac mini. Whether you build your own custom drive and card configuration or select one of our convenient ready-to-run solutions, the OWC Flex 1U4 is ideal in a wide variety of settings:
A hallmark of OWC FLEX technology is the ability to use U.2 NVMe SSDs as well as the OWC ecosystem of U.2 drives and adapters. U.2 NVMe drives are specifically designed to maximize the PCIe bus and when combined with Thunderbolt, you’ll blast past fast with up to 2750MB/s real-world transfer speed. Whether you use your rackmount setup to complete massive backups faster, stream content during a live performance, edit large format video, or run high transactional and complex calculation applications, you can do it U.2 to it with the OWC Flex 1U4.
The OWC Flex 1U4 goes with the flow when needing to move data outside or beyond the local network. With the OWC U.2 ecosystem, moving and sharing data is fast and easy. Swap out and ship a project from field to post in video production workflows. Move backup data to an offline colocation for backup workflows. The combination of OWC Flex 1U4 and the OWC U.2 ecosystem opens a new dimension to data transfer possibilities.
Flex 1U4 comes complete with hardware for mounting into most racks and cabinets.
Harness the full capability of your OWC Flex 1U4 drive array with the included SoftRAID XT, the most powerful, intuitive RAID management software on the market for macOS and Windows. SoftRAID's RAID creation and management technology has been finely tuned to perfection with over 20 years of development to provide rock solid protection of your data and optimize drive performance. It is packed with features like multiple RAID options, validation and verification of drives, and predictive disk failure with SoftRAID Monitor. SoftRAID provides a level of storage performance that you simply can't get with hardware RAID and is ideal for anyone who needs to safely store and backup massive amounts of data, including educational institutions, government agencies, businesses, content creators, and M&E professionals. If you need even more power and flexibility, you can upgrade to SoftRAID Pro to spread volumes over two or more disk enclosures - impossible with hardware RAID - for incredible performance!
We understand having confidence in gear reliability is paramount to creative professionals. That's why OWC Flex 1U4 solutions go through a multi-step performance certification prior to shipping. This ensures they arrive operating properly and immediately ready for demanding use.
Unexpected disconnects during file transfers or a work session can be devastating. The OWC ClingOn (sold separately) easily reduces if not eliminates cable strain on the OWC Flex 1U4 Thunderbolt connection ports.
We build our hardware to the highest standards of reliability and performance. Because 100% reliability is always the goal, we rigorously quality test and back our hardware with award-winning global customer support.
Capacity | 16TB |
Connector | USB 3.1 |
Color | Black |
Media type | HDD/SDD enclosure |