OWC Accelsior 8M2 Woes

I haven’t heard back from OWC on the failure/licensing issue with SoftRAID and the Thunderbolt 4 32 TB SSD on which I reported in the last post. Today I experienced a new failure. I rebooted my main workstation, and the OWC PCIe 32 TB Accelsior 8M2 array didn’t appear in the File Explorer afterwards. SoftRAID didn’t see the card.

Neither did the Microsoft disk management software.

 

I powered down the workstation and powered it back up again.

Same thing. I’ll email OWC support.

I ran the OWC diagnostics, but it hung.

After an hour of looking at that screen, I rebooted.

The missing OWC array came up. But now I don’t trust it.

This is the latest in a series of OWC device glitches and failures in the last few months, many of which I’ve reported in this blog.

• A USB Mercury dual drive enclosure failed. The idisks inside were fine. I’m still using them in an OWC dock.
• A 4M2 Thunderbolt M.2 SSD box failed. I was able to get it working again by replacing all the M.2 SSDs.
• Another 4M2 SSD box was unrecognized when I moved it from one computer to another.
• An Accelsior 8M2 PCIe SSD array was DOA and was replaced by OWC.

All the time I’ve been struggling with these failures, the rest of my computer gear has been working flawlessly.

A few days later, I shut down the workstation and powered it back up again. The OWC PCIe card was MIA. Didn’t show up in the Device Manager. Didn’t show in the Manage Disks app. A reboot changed nothing. I ran the OWC diagnostics again. I’ll send the results to OWC Support.

I talked to OWC support on the phone. They said that the PCIe card needs an additional power supply cable. I called Dell to get the cable and find out where to plug in the other end. They said I was out of luck; that the power supply in the workstation was modular and had no capability to power PCIe cards that weren’t installed when the computer shipped.

Darn!

I asked the Dell tech about using a 6-pin PCIe Y-connector so that I could steal some of the power going to the NVIDEA GPU. He said he didn’t think that would work. I think I’ll try it anyway.