There’s fast external storage, and then there’s the kind of speed meant for folks pushing massive files all day long. Other World Computing is clearly going after that crowd with the new Express 4M2 Ultra, a four slot NVMe enclosure built around Thunderbolt 5. It made its debut today at NAB 2026, and this thing feels very much like it was designed with video editors and creative pros in mind.
The idea is simple. You bring your own SSDs. Pop in up to four NVMe drives, then configure them however you want. RAID 0 if you want raw speed, RAID 5 or 10 if you care more about redundancy, or just run them as individual disks. OWC says you can hit up to 6622MB per second in real world use, which is the kind of performance that starts to make internal storage look a little less special.
What I like here is the flexibility. You are not locked into a vendor’s drives or stuck with one configuration forever. Pick your own NVMe SSDs, swap them later if needed, and adjust RAID depending on the job. That matters when your workload changes from something like photo editing to heavy video work.
The enclosure itself is compact, but OWC did not ignore thermals. It uses an aluminum housing with an adaptive fan, which should help keep speeds consistent instead of dropping off once things heat up. That’s been a real issue with some smaller high speed enclosures, so it’s good to see it addressed here.
Thunderbolt 5 is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The added bandwidth finally lets multiple NVMe drives stretch their legs. There is also a second Thunderbolt port for daisy chaining, so you can connect more devices or even stack multiple units together. OWC says you can combine several enclosures into a single large volume, which sounds like overkill until you are dealing with multi-terabyte video projects.
Compatibility looks broad too. It works with Thunderbolt 5, Thunderbolt 4, USB4 systems, and even older Thunderbolt 3 Macs. That is important, because plenty of pros are still running older Apple hardware that is not getting replaced anytime soon.
Of course, this is not a casual plug and play product. You need to bring your own drives and understand RAID at least a little. OWC leans on its SoftRAID software to make things easier, but this is still aimed at users who want control rather than simplicity.
There’s also MacDrive 12, and this one deserves a closer look than it might usually get. If you have ever tried plugging a Mac formatted drive into a Windows PC, you already know the pain. By default, Windows just does not play nice with APFS or even older HFS+ formats. MacDrive 12 fixes that in a pretty direct way.
Once installed, Mac formatted drives show up in Windows Explorer like they belong there. You can open files, copy data, and even write back to the drive without doing any conversions or jumping through hoops. The big addition this time is full support for encrypted APFS volumes, which is something a lot of competing tools either struggle with or avoid entirely. That matters if you are dealing with sensitive data and do not want to sacrifice security just to move files around.
It also goes beyond simple access. MacDrive 12 includes disk management tools, so you can format, partition, and repair Mac drives directly from a Windows machine. It supports Apple RAID and SoftRAID setups too, which is useful in mixed environments where drives are constantly moving between Mac and Windows systems.
One feature that stands out is its handling of APFS crash protection. If a system loses power in the middle of a write, APFS is designed to prevent corruption by discarding incomplete writes. MacDrive 12 keeps that behavior intact on Windows, which is a nice bit of reassurance for anyone working with important data.
In practical terms, this is aimed at creative pros, IT admins, and anyone dealing with cross platform workflows. Think video editors offloading footage, photographers moving large libraries, or even businesses that run both Mac and Windows systems side by side. It removes one of those annoying friction points that has existed for years.
The OWC Express 4M2 Ultra is available for preorder now starting at $399.99, or $549.99 with SoftRAID included, and it is expected to ship in Q3 2026. MacDrive 12 arrives April 28 for $59.99, with upgrades priced at $29.99.
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