Other World Computing (OWC) concluded its NAB 2026 exhibition recently, and a couple of new stuff they announced are a pair of hardware and software.
On one side, you’ve got the new Express 4M2 Ultra, which is a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure capable of hosting 4x NVMe drives, and it lets you build your own RAID setup using whatever drives you trust with support for RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 10, or even JBOD, with real-world speeds going up to 6622MB/s which is suitale for heavy workloads like 8K video editing.
Compact and scalable, you can load up to 32TB in a small footprint, and daisy-chain multiple units together into a single large volume, while the aluminum build and adaptive cooling system keep thermals in check. It’s also broadly compatible across Thunderbolt 5, 4, 3 (Mac), and USB4 systems, so it’s not locked into one ecosystem.
At the same time, the MacDrive software is getting upgraded from 11 to 12, made for Windows users who need full access to Mac-formatted drives, including HFS+ and APFS, with native read and write support even for encrypted volumes.
Things are super simple here, as the app will do the “cross-talking” for you, then you’ll just see the Mac drives showing up directly in Windows Explorer and behave like native drives. You can open, edit, and save files normally, while also getting access to disk management tools like formatting, partitioning, and repair – all from within Windows.
It also fully supports encrypted APFS volumes, RAID configurations like SoftRAID and Apple RAID, and even crash protection to prevent data corruption if something goes wrong mid-write.
Price and Availability
- Express 4M2 Ultra – Preorder now opens; Starts from US$399.99; Shipping starts from Q3
- MacDrive 12 – Launching April 28; US$59.99 (Upgrade price available for existing users)
