OWC heads to Inter BEE with 3,650MB/s CFexpress cards, an 8TB pocket SSD and a 128TB RAID

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Inter BEE is Japan’s big broadcast show, and OWC is using its stand to lay out the whole storage chain in one place. Cards go into the camera, readers dump the footage, portable SSDs shuttle it, and RAID boxes park it for the archive. Every link in that chain got faster this year, and most of the upgrades ride on Thunderbolt 5. It’s the rare stand where a memory card and a 128TB archive box share a conversation.

The show runs November 18-20 at Makuhari Messe outside Tokyo, with OWC in Hall 7 at Stand 7510. The demo list runs long: CFexpress cards and readers, the Envoy Ultra portable SSD, two Thunderbolt 5 RAID systems, a stackable drive shaped for the Mac Studio, docks, and SoftRAID 9 underneath most of it.

OWC Atlas Ultra CFexpress 4.0 Type B Memory Card (1TB)
Up to 3,650MB/s read and 3,000MB/s write · 1,500MB/s minimum sustained write · Approved for RED V-Raptor and Blackmagic cinema cameras
Price: $749.99 at Amazon
Where to buy: Buy on Amazon

The cards come first

Atlas Ultra CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards top the card wall. OWC rates them at up to 3,650MB/s reads and 3,000MB/s writes, with a 1,500MB/s minimum sustained write that holds while a cinema camera records 8K RAW on long takes. Peak numbers sell cards. Sustained numbers finish takes, and the sustained figure is the one OWC prints in the headline slot.

The approval list backs the pitch. RED signed the cards off for the V-Raptor, and Blackmagic approved them for the PYXIS 6K and URSA Cine. They shrug off impacts, bends, shocks, static, UV and x-rays, and carry a three-year warranty.

Older bodies aren’t locked out, either. The cards still slot into CFexpress 2.0 and 1.0 cameras.

Pricing is live now: the 2TB card runs $1,379.99 at Amazon. OWC’s free Innergize app rides along with every card, checking flash health, sanitizing media between jobs, and pushing firmware upgrades in the field when a new camera body lands.

A reader that keeps up

Fast cards deserve a fast exit. The Atlas CFexpress Card Reader moves files over USB4 at 40Gb/s, reads Type B media, and ships with a Type A to B adapter, so a Sony shooter on Type A cards dumps through the same little brick a RED crew uses.

The rest of the Atlas family fills the same wall: Pro and Core CFexpress cards for stills shooters, Ultra V90 SD cards, and dual-slot readers for crews mixing formats on one job.

The four-bay gets Thunderbolt 5

ThunderBay 4 has been OWC’s four-bay workhorse for a decade, and it just picked up Thunderbolt 5. Two TB5 ports split host and daisy-chain duty, capacity tops out at 128TB, and OWC quotes real-world speeds up to 1,268MB/s with hard drives and 1,703MB/s with SSDs spinning inside.

It ships configured for RAID 5, with SoftRAID 9 watching drive health and flagging a tired drive before it takes a project with it. SoftRAID 9 also adds RAID 6 and 6+, which keep the array whole through two dead drives instead of one.

We covered the ThunderBay line back in 2020, when 128TB over Thunderbolt 3 was the headline. The box kept its shape and gained the faster port.

Pre-orders are open now and shipments start next week. The empty enclosure starts at $549.99, and configured systems start at $1,499.99.

8TB in a coat pocket

Envoy Ultra was the first Thunderbolt 5 portable SSD, and a new 8TB model doubles the old ceiling. Reads run over 6,000MB/s. Long writes settle lower, at 1,350MB/s on the 2TB and 1,700MB/s on the 4TB, and the aluminum case stays fanless and silent while it works.

The case earns its keep outside the edit bay, too: crushproof, IP67 waterproof and dustproof, bus-powered off the host, with the cable built in so there’s nothing extra to lose in a camera bag.

No fan, no separate cable, nothing to forget.

Amazon carries the full line tonight at $799.99 for 2TB, $1,379.99 for 4TB, and $2,499.99 for the new 8TB, and it runs across Macs, PCs, iPad Pros, Chromebooks and Surface machines.

The desk stack and the shuttle

StudioStack is shaped exactly like the machine it serves. It nests above or below a Mac Studio or Mac mini, pairs an NVMe SSD with a SATA hard drive bay for up to 32TB under one lid, and runs up to 6,302MB/s in the same slab of aircraft-grade aluminum.

A six-port Thunderbolt and USB hub rides along in the same box.

ThunderBlade X12 plays a different role entirely: the production shuttle. Twelve SSDs in one portable case reach 96TB, peak at 6,600MB/s with 5,990MB/s sustained writes, and run RAID 5 for the trip between set and studio.

The Express 4M2 Ultra squeezes four NVMe drives into a compact box good for 6,622MB/s, pre-configured with SoftRAID from 4TB to 32TB, sold bare for builders, and happy to daisy-chain its way to 128TB.

Around those headliners sit the Jellyfish Nomad, a self-contained mobile NAS built for DIT carts and location work, a Thunderbolt 5 dock with dual 10GbE for edit rooms sharing one storage pool, a dual-HDMI Thunderbolt 5 dock, the Guardian hardware-encrypted portable for footage that can’t travel in the clear, the Express 1M2 80G pocket enclosure, and OpenDrives, the newest name in the family, handling media storage management for productions that outgrow a single workstation.

Put the stand together and it covers a production from the first card swap to the final archive, with the same company selling every hop in between. Crews shooting CFexpress and cutting on Thunderbolt 5 Macs get the most out of it. Everyone else gets a clear look at where fast storage is heading next.

OWC Atlas Ultra CFexpress 4.0 Type B Memory Card (1TB)
Up to 3,650MB/s read and 3,000MB/s write · 1,500MB/s minimum sustained write · Approved for RED V-Raptor and Blackmagic cinema cameras
Price: $749.99 at Amazon
Where to buy: Buy on Amazon

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