OWC’s ThunderBay Flex 8 Storage and Expansion Tower for Macs Now Available

Popular Mac accessory maker OWC today announced the launch of its ThunderBay Flex 8 tower for media professionals, offering eight drive bays, a handful of ports for connecting peripherals, and a PCIe slot for expansion capabilities, all connected to your Mac over Thunderbolt 3.


The ThunderBay Flex 8 resembles a black version of the Power Mac G5 and original Mac Pro design, and it opens up to reveal eight SATA/SAS drive bays capable of accepting both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives, with the top four bays also able to accept U.2/M.2 NVMe drives. There’s also a PCIe x16 connector/x4 lane slot for adding cards such as audio/video capture or additional SSD storage.


Near the bottom of the front of the ThunderBay Flex 8 is a string of ports for connecting peripherals, including a pair of 10Gb/s USB-A ports, a 10Gb/s USB-C port, and CFexpress and SD 4.0 card readers. On the rear of the tower are a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports (one upstream and one 15W downstream) and a DisplayPort 1.4 port.

Pricing on the ThunderBay Flex 8 starts at $1,299 for just the enclosure, or it can be ordered with various combinations of drive types and capacities that can push a maxed-out configuration to nearly $8,000.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with OWC. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

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