All Posts by Date or last 15, 30, 90 or 180 days.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases @AMAZON

Designed for the most demanding needs of photographers and videographers.
The fastest, toughest, and most compatible portable SSD ever with speeds up to 2800MB/s.

Banishing the Drone of Spinning Hard Drives: and Fans: Moving to 8TB OWC Thunderblade SSD

See OWC ThunderBlade Gen 2: up to 8TB SSD, Runs Cooler and Faster at Lower Cost.

I’ve always been sensitive to auditory noise but my March 2018 concussion amped up that issue and made reducing ambient noise in my work environment a priority. See Brain-Saver: Sony Noise-Canceling Headphones for more on what noise means to me—my brain is “in progress” on recovery—good progress, but I’ll see in another year how things stand. In any case, a near-silent computing environment is a big plus.

Getting to Fast Silence with the 8TB OWC Thunderblade

Consult with me for a tailor-made computing system, choice of computer, SSDs and hard drives, backup, RAID, etc.

I’m finally about to implement a system design I’ve been after for years: a near-silent operating environment by using hard drives only for 3rd-tier and backup storage, thus allowing me to leave them turned off, eliminating noise and cutting power usage as a bonus.

While 8TB of SSD is not enough for everything I’d like to have available at all times, I can manage things very well by architecting things in terms of three tiers of storage, plus backups.

Storage, Tier 1: the internal SSD of the 2017 iMac 5K

Core essential data totals about 500GB for me. This is the stuff that MUST always not only be accessible, but be on a very fast SSD. I expect it to grow to 800GB within two years.

Add to that projects within the last year or so (around a terabyte) and that comes to 1.8TB needed on the internal SSD. Thus a 2TB SSD is the absolute minimum capacity SSD that I will buy in any Mac (many users might be fine with 1TB).

The idea here is that project migrate off the internal SSD as needed, to Tier 2 storage.

Going to a 4TB internal SSD would be slick, but that would require a new Mac and bumps up the price about $2000 over 2TB, which doesn’t make sense when the 8TB OWC ThunderBlade can be had for a better price per TB and when that 8TB can be moved to any Mac or a new Mac. Plus I don’t really need more than 1TB of active working space internally. So I see an internal SSD of 2TB as the smart move at this time/price juncture. If prices on an internal 4TB SSD drop, of course I’d go for that

OWC ThunderBlade

Storage, Tier 2: the 8TB OWC Thunderblade

There is absolutely nothing limiting about the performance of the OWC ThunderBlade for use as my primary storage (it’s awesomely fast), but 2TB + 8TB = 10TB happens to be about what I need for the next two years or so to work with an all-SSD setup. In a sense this is a “waste” of the Thunderblade performance since much of its capacity will just store image files. But as it turns out, the OWC ThunderBlade offers an unbeatable combination of speed, capacity and silence.

Compared to using something like dual Samsung 4TB @AMAZON SSDs, the OWC ThunderBlade is an industrial grade silent solution*. I deem the OWC ThunderBlade to be far superior to housing two far slower Samsung 4TB @AMAZON SSDs in dual USB-C enclosures—with at best 1/3 the speed while also terminating my Thunderbolt 3 chain—a non-starter. I actually ordered two Samsung 4TB SSDs and rejected them as a solution—a performance and connectivity hassle (I travel a lot where too few ports is a headache), plus I’d want to stripe them, which I’d prefer to avoid.

* OWC claims “near silent” which I don’t understand that, as the Thunderblade has no fan.

CLICK TO VIEW: OWC Thunderblade

Storage, Tier 3: overflow data

Tier 3 captures all older stuff that doesn’t really need to be accessible all the time. The solution here is a single 14TB hard drive in an OWC Mercury Elite Pro case (it’s fanless). The noise level is low when/if I do need to power it on and with Sorbothane bumpers @AMAZON, the vibration can be killed almost completely, so it’s qualifies as near silent.

Although OWC sells only a 10TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro, it’s possible to buy it as an empty enclosure, and then add a 12TB or 14TB hard drive.

CLICK TO VIEW: Single hard drives in a fanless enclosure

Backups

OWC ThunderBlade

Backup drives for the internal 2TB SSD are also SSDs, so they can remain on since they too are silent, and it’s critical to have ongoing backups as I work. I repurpose older SSDs for this purpose and a great choice is the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini, which can use a USB-C port, or just plug into any standard USB 3.1 port.

For the bulk of my data, and many redundant copies, hard drives are perfect. At least once a day and perhaps twice, I can power-on a the OWC Thunderbay and make clones to hard drives, cycling through all of them regularly. Since the internal iMac 5K SSD and the OWC ThunderBlade both have bandwidth far in excess of even six hard drives, I can bang out as many as 10 redundant backup clones simultaneously, thus reducing my backup time as well (I generally make no fewer than three backups every day).

There is an admirable functional elegance to this tiered approach:

  • No more wasting hard drive space by having to use RAID-5 to achieve speed and fault tolerance: since primary data is all on fast SSDs, all my backup drives can be non-RAID, always preferred for backups.
  • More backup copies, each independent and separately storable
  • In effect I can double my backup redundancy since I don’t waste the bulk of the capacity of at least 4 hard drives (because of using RAID to get the performance and reliability).

Older and smaller hard drives (5GB, 8GB) for backup still need to be RAID-0 striped pairs, but the newer 14TB drives should be able to hold everything for another few years. I may just sell off the 5GB and 8GB drives, keeping the 12TB and 14TB drives.

CLICK TO VIEW: OWC Thunderbay Solutions

View all handpicked deals...

Sony WH-1000XM5 Noise-Canceling Wireless Over-Ear Headphones (Black)
$398 $328
SAVE $70

diglloyd.com | Terms of Use | PRIVACY POLICY
Contact | About Lloyd Chambers | Consulting | Photo Tours
Mailing Lists | RSS Feeds | X.com/diglloyd
Copyright © 2020 diglloyd Inc, all rights reserved.
Display info: __RETINA_INFO_STATUS__