This dual ThunderBlade setup pricey, but it's insanely-fast, dead-silent, and cool to the touch. OWC:
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Wow, dreamy speed. I want them both, but would have to sell my car for the 8TB versions .. sooo, that’s not very practical. Do all storage capacities contain 4 individual SSDs inside (including the 1TB model)?
Good question, I imagine that’s the case, but I’m not sure. Will check with them to find out.
An 8TB SSD would solve all my space and access issues for a good 5 years at minimum. If only it wasn’t SO expensive. Why are there no cheaper alternatives for thunderbolt 3 users?
There’s lots of thunderbolt drives out there that are less expensive. We’ve covered tons of them.
I NEED THE TRIPLE DECK SANDWICH Thunderblade Combo for my A7sIII 8k Workflow!!!
Seriously though, is this set-up more expensive than storage upgrade from apple store when one buys imac pro?
There are YT tech reviews, then there’s Jeff’s reviews!!! Thanks!
Thanks. And yes, it’s more expensive. For starters, the iMac Pro maxes out at $2800 for 4 TB. That’s actually not a bad price, I guess, all things considered. It would probably give the dual ThunderBlade setup a run for its money speed-wise, although it’s only a fourth of the size.
Another outstanding, well-written, detailed and entertaining review! Thanks so much, Jeff! Love your very practical, and very sophisticated reviews.
Thanks for watching, Benjamin.
i think it should double the speed when in raid0…
SO MUCH MONEY.
What about two Samsung X5 in Raid 0?
Good question. I think I might add that to my to-do list. One bad thing about the X5s, though, because they are so small they are more susceptible to throttling when under load. Probably not a very ideal setup for workflows that need reliable throughout numbers from A-Z. Those Samsung’s are still good drives, though.
I really need that to store my nokia 6600 photos! My HDD is full!!
Thanks Jeff mate, Great review and good to know how best to set them up for WHEN I win the $ lotto $ and buy three of these and go mad with making a Sh%t load of videos yeah.
Two nvme in raid 0 would be faster and cheaper than this.
Is 2.2GB/s basically saturating TB3? I read that TB3 is limited to 22gbps bandwidth for PCIe lanes and the rest is reserved for Displayport. The numbers would seem to line up.
Good question, it seems that way (22gbps), although other data I’ve seen flys in the face of this. Long story short I’m not entirely sure, maybe someone that’s more educated on the matter can chime in?
9to5Mac Have you seen single SSD on one port surpass this number? It seems like 2GB is a hard number to surpass. It will be interesting to see how close USB 3.2 can get to 2GB with its 20gbps rate. Although latency will be worse.
I got as far as $3500!!!! Not for a poor booy like me but thanks for the review, always appreciated.
Now I think it makes sense to max out the storage of iMac Pro. The asking price of this sad is way out of reasonable price. And only 1x link for each ssd if used alone? Cmon
heres me crying with my macbook pro mid 2010 with speeds around 200 🙁 lol getting a 2018 model this year though 🙂
There is a very important thing you forgot to mention,
We’ll talk about it a little bit later
Nice to see. Did you have any weird interference with your UA Arrow interface while using the OWC drives? More in particular having the UA Arrow not being detected or disconnected by the system?
Very good lesson on using two buses to get the most speed from your two drive setup.
Each SSD has only x1 PCIe lanes? Talking about bottlenecks… pretty major design flaw imho.
It’s not a design flaw for the ThunderBlade, it’s the way Thunderbolt 3 is designed. There are four lanes for the Thunderbolt 3 connection, which means each SSD inside the enclosure gets a lane.
+9to5Mac Thanks for the clarification. So I guess they used 4 drives to achieve maximum capacity? Because the latest/fastest SSDs already use and need x4 PCIe alone.
He actually thinks NAND flash needs to be cooled. Ya kid Nand actually works more efficiently at high temps……………..
thats embarrassing lmao