- Own thunder bay keep drive spinning driver#
- Own thunder bay keep drive spinning software#
- Own thunder bay keep drive spinning license#
The non-Lite version also supports RAID 4, 5 and 10, but it will cost you about $100 more. The Lite part means you only get access to RAID 0 and 1.
Own thunder bay keep drive spinning license#
The XT part seems to denote that the license is tied to the OWC storage you have purchased SoftRAID with.
There seem to be about 73 other versions of SoftRAID you can buy, but let’s just stick with these two. Now SoftRAID is a bit of a marketing disaster, so without going into too many details, let me just say that as far as I can tell, SoftRAID can be purchased as a bundle in 2 versions – XT Lite and XT. SoftRAID can be purchased from OWC either as a standalone package or in a bundle with the ThunderBay.
Own thunder bay keep drive spinning driver#
The role of this driver is fulfilled by SoftRAID and while some may worry that this setup would put unnecessary load on the host’s CPU, the CPU usage during my testing was mostly negligible.
Own thunder bay keep drive spinning software#
ThunderBay presents its drives to the connected host as individual drives and the host then needs to run a software RAID driver on top of them to provide the RAID functionality. The RAID functionality in multi-bay storages is usually provided onboard, however that is not the case with ThunderBay.
Unfortunately however, ThunderBay is a deeply conflicted product that manages to deliver on all of these ideas, yet it somehow falls completely flat due to some unfortunate product management decisions I will get into below.įirst though, let’s have a look at how the storage holds together. No nonsense, reasonable price, reliably built. Let me just say here that I like the idea behind OWC products. This was despite some previous negative experience I had with OWC where one of their SSDs died on me just days after its warranty ended. Drobo’s reviews point out unreliable internal cabling and the other companies didn’t offer 6 bay solution in the price range I was looking at. So after much deliberation, I’ve decided to go with OWC ThunderBay 6. While QNAP has some interesting NAS/DAS hybrids, the Thunderbolt connectivity works over Ethernet which sounded like a potential source of reliability issues. The major players seem to be QNAP, Drobo, G-Technology (WD), LaCie and OWC. Unfortunately, there are not many vendors in the consumer DAS market. But since I’ve fancied the idea of being able to edit photos and videos directly from the storage, I went with this option in the end. However DAS is usually just a dumb storage with no additional features. These are usually much faster, especially those with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. They however come with one major downside – they are only as fast as your network, which these days means 1Gbit/s (of 10Gbit/s in theory, but prices for that kind of network equipment are still substantial). These are more popular and usually come with a ton of features (including VPN and media servers like Plex) and they also can be accessed simultaneously from multiple devices. There are 2 paths for those wishing to graduate to a multi-bay storage: Multi-bay storage seemed like a better option. I briefly contemplated getting just a bigger 2.5″ drive (there now seem to be 5TB or even 8TB drives on the market), but since I’ve recently started playing with 4k video, this wouldn’t be a very future-proof solution. After finally filling up my trusted old 2.5″ 4TB USB photo hard drive, the time has come to look for a bigger storage.
0 kommentar(er)
