OWC U2 Shuttle Carries Up to Four NVMe M.2 SSD to U.2 Carrier Shuttle

Works with systems that use U.2 drives. Put Nvme drives in raid 0 and it worked on a PC in Win10. Kept pci slots open for other devices.

Owc at it again with this one, I truly love them, I have two of these in a mercury u.2 pro dual with 8 4tb drives in them. I have zero complaints another quality product!

I bought an enclosure to add NVMe to my Mac.....it didn't come with any of these. Buying 2 of these was more expensive than the enclosure. Very shady business practice!

I added this to my OWC flex8 in bay one with 4 x 4tb NVMEs. Works like a charm.

I bought 2 of these for my Mercury Pro U.2 Dual. I’ve got 2 Samsung drives in each and can put up to 4 in each. They work just fine.

I wanted to create a fast 15-20 TB external Thunderbolt RAID-5 array, and the best option I found was the OWC Mercury Dual U2 enclosure, a pair of these U2 shuttles, and 16 TB of NVME disks (8 x 2TB). The entire package cost about $1500 in early 2023 as I write this, and for that, I get 14TB usable space in a fault-tolerant RAID 5 configuration and throughput in the 2800MB/sec range. Should M2 NVME prices drop in the future, I can scale up to 32TB or even 64TB just by replacing the NVME storage whenever I need - that will meet my needs for the foreseeable future.It took a bit of chatting with OWC to understand the options OWC offers and how these shuttles fit into the picture. If you buy their Mercury enclosure pre-populated with disks, you end up getting two SSDs that you can use in a RAID 0/1 configuration. Since RAID 5 requires more than two drives, you need to go a different way - that's where these U2 shuttles come in. Instead of using U2 SSDs, the shuttles let you mount up to four NVME drives, with each appearing as a separate drive to your computer. The OWC Mercury enclosure gives you two U2 bays, so with two shuttles, that's a total of 8 drives - and certainly, that lets you use RAID 5.If you just buy the OWC Mercury enclosure, it doesn't include the NVME shuttles. If you want, you can use the enclosure with U2 disks and no shuttles are needed. It's only when you want to use NVME drives as I've described that you need the shuttles.There are a lot of NVME products at various price points, but since the OWC Mercury enclosure is limited to about 2800 MB/sec, I didn't see the need for the super-speedy Gen 4 devices...instead, I went with a more mainstream Western Digital "Blue" 2TB - the prices were less than half what some of the higher-end drives cost, and I don't believe they perform any differently.To get RAID 5, about the only solution I could find was OWC's SoftRaid product. I was concerned about the overhead of software RAID, but it seems fine so far. If I run a benchmarking program like BlackMagic, I get around 2800MB/sec most of the time, and about 8-10% CPU utilization by SoftRaid.Be warned that one of the sketchy things about SoftRaid is that there are several versions, depending what you connect to it. If you want to use a Sabrent NVME enclosure (for instance), you need the "Pro" version of SoftRaid, and it's expensive. OWC essentially gives you a 50% discount for buying SoftRaid with one of their disk enclosures. Still, there are some other limitations to think about - unless you opt for the more expensive version, you can't create volumes that span enclosures (even if they're both OWC enclosures), for example.Otherwise, SoftRaid works as advertised. The installation is somewhat more complicated if you're on an M1 Mac, but OWC has a detailed and up-to-date procedure that worked fine for me. I'm a bit skeptical as to whether SoftRaid can keep up with new operating systems and hardware, but seeing it run on my M1 Mac and OS X Ventura, it does seem like the vendor is keeping up. Still, at some point, perhaps the worst outcome would be that I'd have to reformat the disks with Apple's RAID 0/1, so even if SoftRaid doesn't survive for the long term, the hardware isn't a total loss.The other concern I had was disaster recovery. If I used Apple's built-in RAID and put TimeMachine data on the external drive, recovery from a complete system failure is easy...you just point to your TimeMachine data on a new/repaired Mac, and everything is brought back up to the point of your last backup. With SoftRaid volumes, you need to bring up Mac OS X, then install SoftRaid, then run TimeMachine.As for the shuttles, they are a solid and well-machined design that delivers as advertised. The shell itself is solid aluminum and has good heat sinking - with 8 NVME drives in a small enclosure, heat dissipation is certainly an important consideration. Otherwise, I found it easy to get my NVME drives mounted with nothing more than a small screwdriver - everything aligned properly, sealed tightly and just worked on the first try. The fit in the OWC enclosure is perfect and everything went together precisely.About my only gripe with OWC's shuttle is that the design could easily have been made completely tool-free...I'm not as steady-handed as I once was, and fumbling around with those tiny M2 screws is a disadvantage compared to other designs that just snap in. It's a minor point, and once setup, you'll rarely think about it again, but installing 8 NVME drives in two shuttles involved removing and replacing no less than 26 screws.Overall, I'm happy with the total OWC solution I created, including the shuttles. Yes, it would be nice for OWC's enclosures to include the shuttles and make them tool-free, and I'm not a fan of their SoftRaid licensing. Still, after considerable research, it seems to me that getting similar capabilities from another vendor would cost considerably more, so the overall value and performance OWC provides is still very good.