OWC has announced that the pioneering ThunderBlade external drive is now shipping in four capacities, from 1TB to 8TB. The first-to-market ThunderBlade is the fastest external drive available, with transfer speeds up to 2800MB/s Read and 2450MB/s Write, making it the preeminent production solution for professionals.
Larry O’Connor, Founder & CEO, said in a statement, “We at OWC can’t thank our customers enough for allowing us to do what we love so much every day. We strive to build products that will go further and deliver a better return on our customers’ technology investments. The ThunderBlade is one more example of a solution that will allow our customers to work more effectively, a product that can literally change the way they create. Everyone at OWC is excited by the boundless opportunities the next 30 years will bring for our customers.”
Thanks to SoftRAID’s cross-platform technology, not only is the ThunderBlade the fastest Thunderbolt 3 solution available, it is the only one of its kind to seamlessly support both Mac OS and Windows, allowing for faultless interoperability between them for multi-platform workflow requirements.
Dave Helmly, Sr. Manager, Professional Video/Audio for Adobe Systems Inc. said in a statement “Whether you’re working on a 4K, 5K or 8K production or diving into huge Immersive VR environments, loading large complex projects just got easier with the new ThunderBlade from OWC.”
The ThunderBlade is available in capacities from 1TB up to 8TB, MSRP from US$1,199.99 to $4,999.00.
Source: Other World Computing, Inc.
MacDailyNews Take: OWC’s ThunderBlade drives provide blazingly fast performance.
Very impressive but pricey, however the price will come down in the future
Just imagine how expensive it would be in an aloooominyum case with an Apple logo.
Folks, really? An apparently unedited press release? This is actually an interesting product, and a little editing and insight added to the release would be welcome. (And some subtraction — the PR folks at OWC are probably a bit more interested in Mr. O’Connor’s comments than we are, and I’m an appreciative and regular OWC customer. Ouch!
We’ve been a long time client of OWC, and know them well. We saw the ThunderBlade first hand at this years NAMM show. Was very cool and impressive, but “not ready for sale” they told us. I wanted one right then and there! They teased this… and now its here! Can’t wait to try it.
With prices like this, are these solid-state drives?
Yes
I put together a similar TB3 drive with the sonnet TB3 PCIe chassis and a NVME drive. 500gb for $420.90 off Amazon
Well, I’m only getting 1700 MB/s write and 2200 MB/s read on my ARECA raid (RAID 6) drive. But it’s 48 TB (32 TB after taking away two drives for checksum) and the whole setup was less than this SSD ($1500 for the enclosure, about $2500 for the drives). $1000 more, ¼ the size, for 600 or so more MB/s, hard call. I’m sure there are some applications that need that extra speed. I’d rather have the capacity at almost the speed.
BTW, it is quite a bit faster with RAID 0, but I would never trust RAID 0 or RAID 5. RAID 6 and RAID 10 are the only way to go…
Thunderbolt is still too expensive. Well, actually, way too expensive, and I come from a time of expensive scsi drives. The Thunderbolt chips themselves don’t cost too much, and it’s the same drives, so I can’t figure out where all of this extra cost is coming from.