OWC today announced a desktop drive with Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 connectivity that offers up to 10TB of storage capacity, 256MB of memory and 10Gbps throughput.
The new Mercury Elite Pro Dual drive comes factory set for use in RAID 0 mode, for "striping" data across both drives for the highest speed backup.
The drive comes with two Thunderbolt ports (up to 10Gbps throughput each) and one USB 3.0 (5Gbps) port. It also comes with USB and Thunderbolt cables.
Users can select either two hard disk drives (HDD), two solid-state drives (SSDs) or combine one HDD and one SSD.
In March, LaCie announced its fastest consumer-grade portable, external drive -- the LaCie Little Big Disk, featuring Thunderbolt 2 ports (up to 20Gbps throughput) and two PCIe Gen.2 SSDs. That desktop drive offered blazing fast read speeds of up to 1,375 MBps (or 1.37Gbps). It also offered 1TB of capacity and only worked with Macs.
The LaCie Little Big Disk also retails for $1,299.
Because of internal 3.5-in. SATA drive throughput limitations, the Mercury Elite Pro Dual cannot saturate its 10Gbps Thunderbolt ports.
Applications such as audio/visual post-production, photography, music, graphics, data management, and even Time Machine backups are enhanced with access to data at sustained data rates of up to 442MBps read, 424MBps write.
The Mercury Elite Pro Dual drive is 2.8-in. x 9-in. x 5.25-in. in size and weighs 5.5 pounds.
The Mercury Elite Pro Dual desktop drive opened to expose its internal hard drives. (Photo: OWC)
The drive comes in capacities ranging from 2TB with 64MB of cache with a price of $430 to 10TB and 256MB of memory for $950. Drive capacities expand in 2TB increments in between those models.
OWC also offers just the drive enclosure without internal hard disks to allow users to install their own 3.5-in. drives. That enclosure retails for $300.
The Mercury Elite Pro Dual doesn't require complicated set-up and comes ready for use with legacy Macs, the latest 2013 Mac models and PCs.
Users can also select any of four modes of operation via a selector switch. Modes include: RAID 0, which uses both internal hard drives together to provide the fastest performance possible; RAID 1 for writing the same information in real-time for "live activity" data redundancy; Span, which combines both drives into a single volume; and Independent Mode for the most capacity.
The Mercury Elite Pro Dual's rear panel. (Photo: OWC)
This article, OWC releases 10TB, 10Gbps Thunderbolt desktop array, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Lucas Mearian covers consumer data storage, consumerization of IT, mobile device management, renewable energy, telematics/car tech and entertainment tech for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
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