Las Vegas Convention Center Monorail Escalator

Tom Coughlin

At the 2026 NAB I visited several companies providing digital storage products and services for the professional media and entertainment, M&E, industry. As indicated in my previous 2026 NAB article, digital storage is in high demand and M&E companies are having to make clever approaches to their use of storage to meet their needs.

Let’s start off with showings of solid-state drives, SSDs, and hard disk drives, HDDs and storage shelves with these storage components. We covered magnetic tape at the NAB show in the last article. SSDs and HDDs are the storage workhorses in the M&E industry. At the AIC exhibit the company was showing their storage systems and some Sandisk SSDs used in them, see below. These were enterprise SSDs in a few different form factors.

In the Seagate booth there were the company’s Lacie external HDDs on display. These products have been popular in M&E workflows, see below.

Seagate was also showing their storage shelves stuffed with their Exos HDDs. This was part of the company’s Lyve business. The Lyve Cloud was acquired by Wasabi shortly before the NAB show. Seagate was showing their HAMR Exos HDDs, including the recently announced 44TB drives shown below.

Storage companies at the NAB were showing HDD storage arrays, such as the QNAP system with Seagate HDDs shown below.

Western Digital was represented by their renewed G-Drive group, showing external storage systems including NAS and single drive devices, including Thurnderbolt 5 connectivity, which was a major theme for storage devices at the show. Thunderbolt 5 doubles the bidirectional bandwidth to 80Gbps and can provide up to 120Gbps for high-resolution, 4K and 8K, displays. It also supports 240W charging. The image below shows the line-up of products at the G-Drive booth.

The G-Drive booth also featured a line-up of Western Digital Ultrastar data center HDDs, including those shown below. One of these is a 40TB 11-disk OptiNAND SMR Ultrastar HDD. The company also had their Gold, lower capacity enterprise, and Red, Professional, HDDs on display.

Atto was showing Thunderbolt 5 adapters with the company’s ATTO360 software for high-bandwidth Thunderbolt connectivity. The company was also showing their new FastFrame AIR network interface cards, NICs, to provide sustainable network speed. Atto was also showing their XstreamCORE Ethernet Intelligent Bridges allowing sharing SAS storage over Ethernet networks. The image below shows Ethernet storage for Macs using Atto’s NICs. Atto devices were also on display at many other booths at the show.

OWC was also showing their latest gear at the show, as well as sharing their booth with video streaming start-up Strada. The recently released OWC Express 4M2 Ultra, shown below, is a Thunderbolt 5 four-slot NVMe M.2, 2280 or 2242, SSD enclosure. It is considerably more compact than the prior generation product and can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 4, 5 or 10 as well as just a bunch of drives, JBOD and providing performance up to 6.6GB/s. A second Thunderbolt 5 port enables daisy chaining up to five additional Thunderbolt devices.

The company also launched its MacDrive 12 solution for providing complete Mac Disk Access on Windows and including native encrypted APFS support.

Also, at the OWC booth was Strada, an LA startup, offering an on-line access alternative to commercial cloud services. Strada Connect, on display at the show, is a peer-to-peer connected platform that allows streamed access to content on a remote system. The remote drives appear in your finder as if they were physically connected storage. However, when you access the remote drives you don’t store the accessed content, you stream it to your application as needed. The stored data never moves. These streams act like access to locally stored content that integrates with common video and audio editing platforms.

By not moving and storing content in bulk, but only accessing it as a bit stream as needed the user avoids data duplication, uploading, syncing content, caching and other ways that current cloud environments require. As long as you have a good internet connection, it feels like you are editing with local content and without the additional overhead of conventional cloud-based services.

The 2026 NAB featured storage solutions from AIC, Atto, OWC, QNAP, Sandisk, Seagate, and Western Digital. Strada, at the OWC booth, showed cloud-less remote editing.