DEAL: OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID-5 Edition with Extra 4TB Drive

2015-08-22 - SEND FEEDBACK

Related: Other World Computing, OWC Thunderbay, OWC ThunderBay 4, RAID, RAID-5, Thunderbolt

OWC has the OWC Thunderbay 4 with free spare 4TB HDD in tray on special this weekend for $1149 (about $350 off).

It’s the RAID-5 edition with an extra (cold spare) drive. That’s five 4TB hard drives total. Use the cold spare as a backup in the meantime—no need to let it sit in drawer (hint: buy a 2nd empty Thunderbay).

RAID-5 is fault-tolerant meaning it can survive the failure of one of the drives: swap it for the spare and keep working.

You can run the unit as a single 12TB RAID-5 volume, or (my preferred approach) partition it into three separate 4TB RAID-5 volumes. Or not use RAID at all, and use the drives as single non-RAID drives.

See the MPG review of the OWC Thunderbay 4. MPG has five of these units—favorite storage device ever.

UPDATE: OWC also has the 5.0TB Toshiba drives with 3 year warranty for $163.99. Perfect for the Thunderbay, and OWC’s 90-day DOA replacement guarantee* beats anyone out there that I know of.

* If a new drive fails within 90 days OWC will replace it with a new one.

OWC Thunderbay 4 — 4-drive RAID-5 Solution