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These drives cost about $900 a piece, which means that four of them plus the $349 enclosure will run you just south of $4000 before tax. To aid my testing, OWC included four of its own 2TB OWC Mercury M.2 drives. A single 2TB module can easily be found north of $1000, so you can probably do the math on how utterly expensive it would be to equip the OWC Express 4M2 with high-end drives to meet the maximum 8TB capacity. While they’re slowly coming down in price, high-end M.2 SSDs are still very expensive. OWC would be happy to sell you its own M.2 drives, but there are also other options from companies like Samsung. If you’re looking to get the best performance out of the 4M2, then you’ll need to invest in four fast M.2 NVMe drive modules, and be willing to configure all four modules in a RAID 0 configuration using the included SoftRAID software. Once the M.2 drives are installed, just reconfigure everything in reverse.
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Simply remove a couple of thumb screws, remove the cover, disconnect the fan, and install the modules.
Installing M.2 drives inside the enclosure is a fairly straightforward process.
Keep in mind that the OWC Express 4M2 is just an enclosure, and you’ll need to add one or more M.2 drives to the internal bays in order to use it. OWC says its gone through a lot of testing to ensure that the fan is well matched with the enclosure to help manage heat, and doesn’t support replacing the fan with what some may deem as quieter third-party solutions. M.2 drives generate a lot of heat, and thus fans are a requirement and can’t be disabled. It’s not that the fan is obnoxiously loud either way, but it’s definitely noticeable in a quiet room, and even more so when the enclosure is sitting in a vertical position. I recommend keeping the 4M2 resting in its horizontal position, because this causes the fan to face downward, helping to suppress some of its fan noise. Feet on the side and on the bottom of the unit allow it to rest horizontally or vertically depending on your preference. The unit sports a black exterior with perforated holes on the front panel to help facilitate air flow. Stack two 3.5-inch mechanical hard drives on top of each other, and you’ll get a rough idea of what it’s like to have the OWC Express 4M2 sitting on your desk. Because the drives are so small, the OWC Express 4M2 enclosure measures only 5.4 x 4.4 x 2.4-inches. As you can probably gather from those measurements, it doesn’t take a lot of real estate to house four M.2 drives. M.2 drives look almost like sticks of gum, measuring roughly 3-inches by less than an inch. Like those enclosures, the OWC Express 4M2 comes equipped with four drive bays, but the difference is the drive “bays” are super-tiny M.2 slots. After reviewing products with four 2.5- or 3.5-inch drive bays, I’m used to seeing larger storage enclosures like the CalDigit T4 or the Akitio Thunder3 Quad X. My first impression of the OWC Express 4M2 is that it’s really small.
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To reach those speeds, you’ll need four fast drives configured with RAID 0 using the included SoftRAID software. OWC says that speeds for the 4M2 can reach up to 2800 MB/s read. It features a compact design and dual Thunderbolt 3 ports for daisy chain setups along with DisplayPort for connecting to an external display. The OWC Express 4M2 is a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that can accommodate up to four M.2 NVMe SSDs simultaneously for up to 8TB of storage.
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