OWC Rocket Yard on it’s fastest portable drive now with USB4!

OWC’s latest drive is USB4, so it supports USB4, USB 3.2, USB 2 AND Thunderbolt 3 & 4, which is $119.99 empty and up to $1299.99 for an 8TB.

I just find it exciting for future OWC products to all be USB 4 so compatible with everything.

And according to Mac Performance Guide the large version is fast, faster than internal Mac Pro drives!

Other World Computing on How to Set Up a Mac for Video Editing

Other World Computing’s Rocketyard has a great video and post for setting up an Editing system. Now of course as a company that sells products they are going to recommend their stuff, but since I mostly use their stuff anyway…

Still it is a little dated since it recommends and iMac Pro (which is EOLed) and a top of the line Intel iMac will likely be faster anyway.

Reuben Evans at OWC’s Tech Talk Blog on what Top Pros want from Apple as a Platform

OWC’s Tech Talk blog has an article with Top Video Pros Weight In On Where Apple Should Take Its Platform. 

It is a good article, if a little too FCP X focused overall. I made my huge post on the problems that I have with extensive use of FCP X, and I wish Apple would deal with them before adding too much else, though collaborative editing might help with some of my complaints quite a bit, but there are still so many to go into.

I totally agree that Apple needs to knock it out of the park with a GPU, but not just for Cinema4D, but also for Premiere Pro (as well as DaVinci). And yea the CPU needs to really stomp ass with After Effects for sure.

An updated XDR display should happen quickly, and the new version should also be the basis for a new iMac Pro.

And yes the Afterburner card needs to be able to decode different codecs as well, not just ProRES, and that should also be either added to the iMac, or make a breakout box with BlackMagic and include the tech in that along with an HDMI out and in.

I really do wish I could afford a MacPro, though with the M1, it calls it into question. Be really weird if Apple ends up with the MacPro as the only Intel Mac, and a medium machine like the article calls for as M1.

SoftRaid Beta 6 is out and works on Big Sur!

Woohooo! Softraid has publicly release it’s SoftRaid 6 beta with support for Big Sur and M1 Macs!  This is huge news, as I can never move to an operating system until SoftRaid supports it, as I can’t work without my RAID.

And it already has the Final Release of the SoftRaid Version 6 Driver included, so a RAID should be fully supported.

SoftRaid is mandatory for a RAID on a mac, so I could not be more happy about this. 

And they are working on M1 support, but it obviously couldn’t be out with development Macs as they didn’t include thunderbolt ports, so you couldn’t test thunderbolt connectivity, but are working on it now.

OWC Thunderbay Update

 So I talked to Other World Computing and they sent me a replacement. I screwed up though, I went by the Thunderbolt id in softraid, but when i pulled a drive the id numbers changed, so I realized I didn’t know if I had the drive that was going offline. When I put the 4th drive back in (with no changes to the other drives) it took 2 days to re-sink the drives, with nary a thing to tell me how long it would take. I decided to back up my raid as quickly as I could. And when they came back they came back I wasn’t dropping a drive again, but now I was nervous.

So I upgraded my RAID from 2 tb drives to 12 tb and reformatted. I was quite surprised as when I formatted the 4 2 tb drives to make it RAID 5 and it took all of 30 seconds. This apposed to when I made the 6 TB raid, which just a couple of years ago took 4 days, which makes me wonder if there wasn’t an issue on one of the 2 TB drives to begin with. As the 36 RAID 5 took 30 seconds to create.

And I worry again because on the first night after formatting one if the drives went offline. Now it cane back with a restart, but it makes me worry that the housing was the issue all along, though OWC hasn’t responded to my further issues.