OWC adds USB 3.0 to Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 enclosures


The Qx2 box from Other World Computing is a four drive RAID system. It currently supports up to 16 TB and adds the port that's been missing. The device now ships with USB 3.0 in addition to FireWire 800 and eSATA. I like this box because it offers RAID 5, which will give a lot of storage with redundancy. A RAID 5 can lose a drive and keep going, which means if a drive dies you can swap it out and keep operating with no data loss. I have this running on FireWire, but it's just kind of slow these days. Thunderbolt would be nice, but USB 3.0 is very fast and available on all recent Macs and PCs. I've been preferring USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt lately due to cost and USB 3 is everywhere these days.

Pricing starts out at $549.99 for a 4TB model and a bare enclosure costs 279.99 if you want to roll your own.