Layout, design and features …
The simple housing can be used both upright and lying flat. There is a white power LED on the front next to the ventilation grille, which lights up during operation but does not indicate any hard disk activity.
The connection for the external power supply, two USB-C / Thunderbolt connections and a display port are located on the back. The latter is practical if you want to loop the display through the OWC case and thus operate two devices with one cable on the host computer. However, the Thunderbolt Connection does not have a PD (Power Delivery) function. This means that the case cannot be used as a complete replacement for a docking station like the previously tested Ugreen DXP480T Plus with USB-C PD.
Although the OWC Express 4M2 housing has 4 internal PCIe 3.0 slots, it only uses one PCIe lane for each of these. In practice, this means that a single SSD is connected at a maximum of 1GB/s (PCIe 3.0 x1). High read and write speeds can therefore only be achieved by combining several SSDs into a RAID array. We take a closer look at exactly how this works and how fast the system becomes in the practical testing.
Unfortunately, the active fan is not temperature-controlled and always runs at full speed. This is quite loud and can unfortunately be quite annoying in a quiet environment.
OWC Express 4M2 Installation …