Because of the performance of the new Apple silicon, I’m gradually switching much of my work to Macs. I have been using a MacBook Pro M4 Max for the past three months, and, after some initial difficulties which required an OS re-install to fix, it appears to be running like a hound. I would like an M4 Mac tower, but they aren’t shipping — or even announced — yet. So I bought a 192 GB DRAM M2 Ultra Mac Studio to tide me over. Since there’s no way to iustall a lot of SSD in that box, I ordered an OWC Node Titan SE DAS box with 36 TB of SSD installed. It arrived a couple of days ago.
When I opened the box, I knew I was in trouble. There was something rattling around in the bottom. I removed the top cover, and fished out this:
Kooks like a PCIe retainer screw, and that’s exactly what is is.
Looking inside the box revealed the PCIe carrier for the SSDs was loose on one end.
In addition, the screw next to that slot , which you can see to the left of my finger, was loose. There was no evidence of Loctite on any of the screws I looked at, in spite of the raison d’etre for the Titan SE being that you could ship your files from one place to another securely.
OWC support initially wanted ot call this shipping damage, and they asked me to file a complaint with FedEx. I told them it looked like improper assembly to me, andI sent them some pictures of the box. Eventually, they agreed and sent me an RMA. But I couldn’t send the box back with one end of the PCIe card flapping around, and I couldn’t reseat the card with the other end attached. I needed to remove the right side skin in order to get at the screws holding the other end of the PCIe card in place. But the screws holding the skin in place were Torx, and I didn’t have the right tools. I ordered a set of Torx drivers. They came the next day, which was today.
I found the right size bit, and removed the top two screws. But the skin wouldn’t come off. I found another screw on the bottom, which took a different size Torx bit. Removing that left the skin still attached. I popped the feet off one side of the case, and found two more Torx screws underneath it.
Removing those let me get the skin off.
The other end of the PCIe card was held on with two more Torx screws, of a third size. I pulled those, and now the PCIe card was free. I removed the other thumbscrew, and seated the PCIe card. Then I put both thumbscrews back, attached the other end of the card with the two Torx screws. I didn’t resintall the right side or the top skin. I attached to power cable and the Thunderbolt cable, and powered up the DAS box.
SoftRAID recognized the drives. So did the OS. I am now transferring files to the new OWC DAS.
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