Other World Computing, a company perhaps best known for making replacement MAC storage has come out with what it claims is not only the world’s fastest but also highest capacity PCIe SSD.
Dubbed the OWC Accelsior 8M2, it uses a design which focuses on heat dissipation so it can make use of the full bandwidth provided by the latest PCIe Gen 4 devices. This reportedly gives the drive speeds of up to 26,000MB/s which is about 4 times faster than what you’d usually expect, even from absolute hulks like Corsair’s new PCIe 4.0 SSD.
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That is very quick, but these drives still aren’t for everyone. They’re not cheap with the empty expansion card, (0TB which you add your own drives) starting at $799 USD. Models with memory included range from 2TB models which start selling at $1,299 and go all the way up to $12,999 for the 64TB units. This is stored across 8 SSD slots, which gives it the highest capacity claim.
Plus to even get full use out of those speeds you’d want to be doing some particular work. For video editors being able to seamlessly playback 16 streams of 8k ProRes444 will be a huge help to workflow, plus that extra speed is bound to be a boon for render times. The units work with Mac, Windows, and Linux without requiring drivers, and has extra RAID capabilities.
There’s a lot of cool things in here, but again you probably don’t need this to run your games. It is worth getting something decent though, as not all PCIe 4.0 SSDs perform as you might expect, and some barely seem different than PCIe 3.0 for speeds. Instead, check out our list of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs for gaming this year.
