OWC (Other World Computing) is framing Thunderbolt 5 storage as a way to keep “local-first” media workflows fast enough that you stop thinking about ports, bandwidth, and copy time, and instead treat external NVMe like a real extension of your workstation. The focus here is bus-powered performance, predictable sustained throughput, and RAID that stays readable across Mac and PC without being trapped behind a proprietary controller.
https://www.owc.com/
On the portable side, the Envoy Ultra is positioned as a single-SSD Thunderbolt 5 drive that pushes into the 6,000 MB/s class on burst and stays in a much higher baseline than typical USB-C SSDs once caches are exhausted. In the conversation, they describe roughly the first ~10% of the capacity sustaining the top band, then settling into about 1,600–1,800 MB/s for longer transfers, which is still very usable for large camera originals, proxies, and scratch media. The enclosure is engineered for passive heat dissipation (no fan, no dust ingress path), and the emphasis is on rugged, field-friendly behavior under real copy pressure and heat.
The bigger “desktop-on-a-cable” concept is the Thunderblade X12: a 12-drive NVMe array scaling by 12-drive increments up to 192 TB, aimed at high-throughput editing, ingest, and on-set shuttling where capacity and sustained speed matter more than peak benchmarks. RAID modes mentioned include 0/1/4/5/10, with RAID 6 planned, and the pitch is end-to-end sustained transfer in the 6,000 MB/s range without thermal throttling even on very large moves. The physical design leans into a heavy-duty heatsink approach to keep performance consistent under load.
A key layer is SoftRAID: software-defined RAID with drive health monitoring and early warning, plus practical interoperability for creators who bounce between macOS and Windows. The point isn’t “RAID replaces backup” (they explicitly call out keeping backups), but that if the enclosure ever dies, the data layout isn’t locked to a proprietary bridge chip—move the blades to another compatible setup and the volume can come back. Thunderbolt 5 also helps with system-level plumbing: where older buses could see display traffic steal priority and cut storage throughput, the added headroom makes it easier to run high-res monitors and fast storage on the same connection without the same penalty.
They also highlight the often-ignored weak link: cabling. A certified 2 m Thunderbolt 5 cable means you can actually place storage, docks, or displays off-desk without gambling on random USB-C wiring, signal integrity, or intermittent drops. This interview was filmed at CES Las Vegas 2026, and it lands as a pragmatic look at how bandwidth, thermals, RAID metadata, and certification details add up to fewer workflow surprises on set.
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