OWC ThunderBlade Gen 2 Keeps Creative Teams on Track

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Ultra High-Performance Thunderbolt 3 storage solution now offers a lower price point and even better performance.

OWC has released the second generation of its super-fast ThunderBlade external SSD, with a lower price point and improved performance. For creative professionals and prosumers who work to capture and process 4K or 8K video, the updated ThunderBlade Gen 2 can be the difference between staying under budget and on-schedule on a project or not.

The new ThunderBlade is stackable and runs cooler than the previous iteration, while still maintaining a near-silent environment with its fanless operation, all factors that can be critical in an operation on the go or in a tight space. With dual Thunderbolt 3 ports users can daisy-chain up to five additional ThunderBlades, and by connecting more than one drive with SoftRAID, speeds can be increased up to 3800MB/s. The newest ThunderBlade can complete a 1TB content transfer in under four-and-a-half minutes.

Wyatt Cagle, Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) for the upcoming feature film “Playing God” had this to say regarding the OWC ThunderBlade’s crucial role in production: “The [two] ThunderBlades are our transfer drives because they’re so fast. Within minutes I’ve got everything logged and ready for the editor. We’re shooting stuff in the morning, the editor is editing it in the afternoon, and the director is seeing something sometimes that night. Without that speed, without the ThunderBlades, we couldn’t do that.”

Whether using a single ThunderBlade on the road or daisy-chaining up to six units in production space for up to 48TB of the fastest transfer speeds OWC has ever produced, users can count on ThunderBlade to help them get their dailies daily, providing safe, creative content management and huge time and money savings in production budgets.

The OWC ThunderBlade comes with a Thunderbolt 3 cable included and is backed by OWC’s 3-year warranty. It is available now at MacSales.com and other online and storefront retailers:

1.0TB OWC SKU: OWCTB3TBV4T01
2.0TB OWC SKU: OWCTB3TBV4T02
4.0TB OWC SKU: OWCTB3TBV4T04
8.0TB OWC SKU: OWCTB3TBV4T08

OWC ThunderBlade: cooler, faster and an even better value.

4 Comments

Stanford Rossiter says:

February 1, 2019 at 9:10 pm

Is Thunderblade Gen 2 bootable in MacOS 10.14.3?
Stanford Rossiter says:

February 1, 2019 at 9:01 pm

Is Thunderblade bootable?
- Stanford Rossiter says:
  
  February 1, 2019 at 9:10 pm
  
  Is Thunderblade Gen 2 bootable in MacOS 10.14.3?
joevt says:

January 31, 2019 at 1:54 am

I would like to see some benchmarks included in the product pages. As far as I know, Thunderbolt 3 is limited to 22 Gbps which is 2750 MB/s. I don’t know if you rounded that up to 2800 MB/s of if you have a benchmark that reached that high.

I would like to see a benchmark for the 3800 MB/s number as well. I’ve done a couple Thunderbolt RAID tests and obtained only 2852 MB/s from a single Thunderbolt controller (one device per Thunderbolt port of the same controller) and 4857 MB/s from two Thunderbolt controllers (in an iMac Mini 2018 using SoftRAID, one device per Thunderbolt controller).

My tests used a single Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro per Thunderbolt device so it might be different than a ThunderBlade but I don’t see how two ThunderBlades that can achieve 2750 MB/s individually can only achieve 3800 MB/s together.

If both Thunderbolt devices are connected to PCH (x4 PCIe lanes) then of course the number is going to be less than 3938 MB/s but I think all Macs with two Thunderbolt controllers have them connected to PCIe x8 CPU lanes instead of PCH.