OWC Thunderblade X8: RAID-0 Stripe or Fault Tolerant RAID-4/RAID-5?

2024-01-14 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: fault tolerance, Other World Computing, OWC Thunderblade, RAID, RAID-0, RAID-4, RAID-5, weather events

re: OWC ThunderBlade

re: OWC Thunderblade X8: NVMe RAID SSD with 8 blades

The OWC Thunderblade X8 arrives for testing on Jan 15. I’m not sure what capacity is coming.

To review, RAID-0 striping gives maximum capacity and performance*, but a failure of a single blade means total loss of the volume.

RAID-4/RAID-5 (same thing in terms of behavior) delivers the ability to survive failure of one blade at the cost of losing 1 of N capacity eg 16TB (8 X 2TB blades) becomes 14TB usable.

I personally don’t want to give up 2TB of the capacity (16TB => 14TB) for the fault tolerance. Mainly because my capacity requirements are already in that ballpark, so losing 2TB would crimp things.

The thing is either 'bulletproof' or it is not—or so I hope.

Still, for many people the difference between 16TB and 14TB might not matter, and the performance should be little different—soon we’ll find out.

* In general, but in the bandwidth limits of the Thunderbolt/USB-C bus may prove the limiting factor.