I’m always looking to reduce the number of things that clutter up my studio, yet at the same time increase my capabilities and efficiencies. Other World Computing fills this order with the Mercury Elite Pro Dual-Drive Hardware RAID Storage Solution with a built-in 3-Port Powered USB Hub.
Two universal drive bays within one enclosure will handle two drives—SSDs or spinning hard drives, or any combination, for up to 36 TB of total storage. You can decide to run the twin drives either in a Redundant Array of Independent Disks or as completely separate drives. A RAID offers a higher level of security by making two copies of everything across the two drives or SSDs. This is useful for highly precious data—song audio files, financial tax records, family archives—things that you cannot lose!
The OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual works with any USB-equipped Mac, PC, mobile or tablet device, gaming console—any device that supports external storage. The front panel has activity LEDs, while the rear panel has two 10Gb/sec USB 3.2 Type C and two 10Gb/sec USB 3.2 Type A connectors; all act as a hub. Besides gaining more storage, I was able to get rid of an extra USB hub.
Meant to stay online all the time, the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual comes in a nice-looking, heat-dissipating aluminum case (matching my Mac Pro) with a quiet and high-efficiency cooling fan. It is powered from an included 12VDC power supply.
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You may select three different RAID modes when first formatting the system. You can choose: Raid 0, RAID 1, JBOD (Just A Bunch Of Drives) or Span. Mine came with two 1TB hard drives, so I have it formatted as 1TB RAID 1, which uses disk mirroring and is fault-tolerant.
I connected it to my Mac Pro Tower to archive a copy of all my interim Pro Tools session files and audio—it powers up whenever I turn on the studio for a session and I love it for its simple operation.
Important to know: It comes with a three-year OWC limited warranty, including a one-year Level 1 data recovery and lifetime expert support. A system with a pair of 2TB 7200 RPM drives, 64MB cache and transfer speeds of up to 576 MB/sec costs $249. The 1TB SSD model with speeds of up to 1026 MB/sec sells for $349 MSRP. Awesome!
