OWC ThunderBlade review: Super rugged, dead quiet, solid-state storage for pros

Macworld

At a glanceExpert's Rating

Pros

Very fast RAID 0 performance

2TB to 32TB capacity

Cross-platform SoftRAID Pro included

Rugged carrying case.

Cons

Super expensive

Our Verdict
It’s pricey, but OWC’s Thunderblade four-slot, NVMe SSD Thunderbolt 3 enclosure delivers the performance goods–with up to 32TB of capacity–to the pros that need it.

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OWC’s ThunderBlade delivers excellent read and write performance in a handsome, svelte package that is available in capacities up to a whopping 32TB. In fact it’s the third fastest external SSD we’ve tested, and the fastest Thunderbolt SSD in the charts.

What it is not, is cheap. Expect to lay down thousands, not hundreds for the experience. For a product aimed at film and video pros, that’s not generally an issue. For you and me…

The ThunderBlade is a black, radiator-finned, 4-slot NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure measuring approximately 7.5-inches long, by 4.75-inches wide, by 1-inch tall. It’s a rather hefty (and sexy by my lights) beast at 1-pound, 10-ounces. No inadvertently sliding off the table with this one.




The Thunderbolt 3 ports and power connector on the back of the ThunderBlade.

A 3-inch long slit on the front is home to the power/activity LED, while the rear of the unit offers up two Thunderbolt 3 ports as well as the DC input jack. The power brick (AC adapter) that fits into said input is 15 volts and 4.8 amps.

As it’s envisioned as fast, rugged storage for video fieldwork, the ThunderBlade comes in a sturdy carrying case that fits both the drive and the power adapter. The case is made of thick, impact-resistant plastic that we’re sure will hold up.




The ThunderBlade sitting in its rugged carrying case.

The ThunderBlade ships with a three-year license for the Pro version of the company’s cross-platform SoftRAID software. After three years, you lose the ability to create new arrays, but basic functionality remains intact–you don’t lose use of the drive.

You may of course also use macOS’s or Window’s own software solutions, but you’re then tied to one or the other operating system. One reason I prefer hardware RAID is that it’s OS-independent. Many of the recovery tools I use are Linux-based.

Note that the ThunderBlade is also available in an eight-slot version, logically monikered the ThunderBlade X8. Alas, you’d think it would top out at 64TB, but it’s currently sitting at 16TB with a 32TB version out soon. We wish there were unpopulated versions of both the four-slot and eight-slot.

OWC ThunderBlade: Price

Hold onto your hats folks: the entry-level 2TB ThunderBlade we tested costs a cool $800. It gets steeper from there, with the 4TB version costing $1,180, the 8TB version is $1,800, the 16TB version is $2800, and the 32TB version setting you back a rather daunting $6,000.




The ThunderBlade sitting on its side, upright.

The pricing places the ThunderBlade firmly in AV professional territory, as there are certainly cheaper ways for end users to get this type of performance and capacity. At least up to 16TB. 8TB SSDs still carry a hefty premium at well over $1,000 each (four are in the 32TB version).

OWC’s own 1M2 and especially Adata’s SE920 40Gbps USB 4 SSDs come to mind as more affordable options for end users.

Still, OWC makes high-quality goods and the warranty is three years which is good for an external drive. But given the price, we do wish the SoftRAID Pro license was perpetual, not limited to three years.

How fast is the ThunderBlade?

Pretty darn fast would be the answer to this question. Even with the four smaller 480GB SSDs OWC shipped in our test unit, the ThunderBlade proved the third fastest external SSD I’ve tested. It’s bested only by the aforementioned Adata SE920 and OWC’s 1M2–both 40Gbps USB 4 drives.

Testing on a Mac Studio with AmorphousDiskMark and Disk Speed test proceeded without incident, but there were one or two issues on PCWorld’s test bed that are described at the end of this section.

We tested in RAID 0 and RAID 1+0, which you might consider for redundancy in the larger capacity configurations. We also tested the ThunderBlade in non-RAID as single drives but performance was as weak as it was with the recently reviewed OWC Express 4M2. About 840MBps reading, and 750MBps writing.

IMHO, there’s no reason to buy a ThunderBlade if you don’t run it in RAID 0. NVMe SSDs are not the failure risks that hard drives are, and there are cheaper options for single drives.




Nothing wrong with these sequential and random transfer numbers from AmorphousDiskMark..

Blackmagicdesign’s Disk Speed Test rated the ThunderBlade as considerably slower than AmorphousDiskMark, with the latter being more in line with the Windows test tools shown after the Disk Speed Test graphic.




Disk Speed Test didn’t rate the ThunderBlade at highly as AmorphousDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark 8 on IDG’s PCWorld Windows test bed thought very highly of the TunderBlade’s sequential transfer capabilities as you can see below.




Though not as fast as the USB 4 drives, the ThunderBlade is pretty darn fast.

Random performance under CrystalDiskMark 8 was good, but not as good as the USB 4 drives.




Random performance under CrystalDiskMark 8 was good, but not as good as the USB 4 drives.

The ThunderBlade was very fast in our 48GB transfer tests. Holding its own against the two extremely fast USB 4 SSDs.




The ThunderBlade was very fast in our 48GB transfer tests. Holding it’s own with the two extremely fst USB 4 SSDs.

The SSDs being only 480GB did rule out our 450GB (483 billion bytes) write to a single drive, but we expect it would be as slow as the 4M2’s[link when possible) we recently reviewed.

The ThunderBlade in RAID 0 is fantastic in this large file write, portending good things when you stream 4K or 8K video to it.




The ThunderBlade as fantastic in this large file write, portending good things when you stream 4K or 8K video to it.

As to those Window idiosyncrasies, in a couple of instances, a reboot was required before a SoftRAID volume or the separate drives would show up. And bizarrely, when I forgot to reformat to NTFS from APFS, SoftRAID still mounted the APFS volume and CrystalDiskMark 8 and AS SSD both ran fine. By what mechanism this was possible, I have no idea (no other suitable software installed) unless SoftRAID sports an APFS driver for Windows. If it does, it isn’t perfect as our real-world 48GB test write froze at the 88 percent mark. Once reformatted to NTFS, everything was hunky-dory and the ThunderBlade performed as advertised.

Note: After this article published I was informed that SoftRAID installs Macdrive which accounts for the volume still showing up. OWC blamed the reboots on Windows Thunderbolt, which I’m more than ready to believe, and the company has fixed the APFS driver issue that caused the tranfer freeze.

Should you buy the OWC Thunderblade 4?

We like the styling, we love the rugged enclosure and carrying case, and the performance is excellent in RAID 0–the only way the ThunderBlade should be utilized by my lights. That leaves financial wherewithal as your sole consideration when buying a ThunderBlade.