OWC announces a range of Thunderbolt 3 products at the 2017 NAB Show, including a 13-port dock, the Envoy Pro EX portable SSD, Mercury Helios 3 PCIe expansion chassis and the Helios FX external GPU.
Customers wanting to add more ports to their Mac Book or Thunderbolt 3-enabled laptop should find the OWC Dock useful. It adds 13 ports, including analog audio in/out, x5 USB 3.1, S/PDIF, FireWire 800, ethernet, x2 ThunderBolt 3 and even mini DisplaPort, allowing one to drive 5K displays, x2 4K displays or a combination of 4K, HD and other displays.
On the storage side, OWC offers a pair of portable storage options-- the Envoy Pro EX, a bus-powered portable SSD with the Thunderbolt 3 interface allowing speeds of up to 40GB/s, and the Mercury Viper, a similar SSD allowing daisy-chain expansion from a compact form factor. Also seen is the Thunderbay 6, a 6-bay RAID powered by SoftRAID designed to offer performance reaching up to 40Gb/s.
Meanwhile the Mercury Helios 3 is a PCIe expansion chassis with a dedicated cooling fan and x2 Thunderbolt 3 ports. It carries a half-length, full-height, double-width PCIe card, supports 4K displays and can be daisy-chained with up to 6 Thunderbolt devices. For a graphics boost customers can also use the Helios FX external GPU.
A final product seen at the show is the DEC-- a 2016 MacBook Pro dock users attach to the bottom of the laptop by replacing the screws holding the bottom plate. It connects to the MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt 3, and adds USB-A ports, ethernet, SD Card slot and up to 4TB storage.