OWC has announced the availability of the new OWC Mercury Helios 3S PCIe card expansion chassis for Thunderbolt 3-equipped Macs and PCs.
It adds an external PCIe slot for addition of pro-level PCIe cards. Its dual Thunderbolt 3 ports offers the ability to daisy-chain up to five additional Thunderbolt peripherals.
The Mercury Helios 3S functions like a dock, allowing the use of a variety of dedicated PCIe cards. Users can capture high-quality audio with a PCIe audio card and then re-task Helios 3S with a PCIe SSD card to edit and archive tracks. According to the folks at OWC, you can swap cards in minutes.
The Mercury Helios 3S supports a variety of half-length, full-height, single or double-width pro-level PCIe cards from leading brands like AJA, Apogee, ATTO, Avid Pro Tools, Blackmagic Design, CalDigit, HighPoint, Intel, Solid State Logic, Universal Audio, and OWC. With dual 40Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 ports, it offers the bandwidth needed to support data-intensive 4K capture cards to speed up diverse video workflows such as vlogging.
You can boost your DAW with external DSP acceleration and run larger mixes with multiple plug-ins. And you can live stream the action in your gaming sessions or share files over a 10Gb Ethernet or Fibre Channel network without any speed throttling.
OWC ha also introduced the OWC U.2 NVMe Interchange System, an optional companion to the Mercury Helios 3S that converts it into a fast-swappable U.2 NVMe SSD storage system. It features a locking drive bay and drive tray that offers access and transport of drives up to 16TB with speeds up to 2631MB/s.
The OWC Mercury Helios 3S PCIe Expansion Chassis is available now at MacSales.com for $229.99. The OWC U.2 NVMe Interchange System for Mercury Helios 3S is sold separately starting from $69.99.