OWC Thunderblade upgrade SSDs possible?

[AdamSeen]

Has anyone tried to upgrade their Thunderblade to other NVM SSDs?

I have a 4TB version, but with SSD hard drives getting cheaper, I would like to upgrade to 8TB or 16TB total storage with 2TB 980 Pros or other 4TB sticks. From the below picture, it looks quite easy:

Image from: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8522/owc-thunderblade-v4-4tb-review/index.html

 

[AdamSeen]

OWC have confirmed it’s possible, but obviously not supported and potential thermal problems - so there you have it. I’ll let you know if I go ahead in the future, it will be a while away.

 

[AdamSeen]

Whilst the project is still a while away, I took the liberty of disassembling it today to have a look at the thermals. Fairly easy to get open and put back together. The thermal pads underneath were a surprise as they connected directly to the board. I didn't measure the thermal pad thickness this time, but it looks to be in the 0.5-1mm

 

[AdamSeen]

1mm on each side. Although on the SSD the controller and the chips vary in height. The controller has 1mm of paste where the chips are a little less at 0.8mm. So something to take into account (perhaps splitting the thermal pads into two)

 

[jimthing]

Interesting thanks.

Thermal paste on each side if the NVMe's, is that right? Or are there also thermal pads of some kind somewhere in addition?

I take it you haven't done this yet though? (Note quite a few Ebay sellers are selling 8TB NVMe's for heavily discounted prices now, especially Corsair ones.). Perhaps the old drives are sellable for something worthwhile to help offset the upgrade cost.

I also wonder if the new SoftRaid v7.5 is finally useable and trustworthy, for those wanting some Raid 5 redundancy out of one of these ThunderBlade boxes?

 

[AdamSeen]

I haven't done it yet, but I would say within the next year I will. They appear to be thermal pads. I need to check with OWC, but there maybe recently license changes from perpetual to until after the warranty has expired. If that's the case, I'll be using Apple Raid instead.

 

[AdamSeen]

Yes - it appears to be the case... I'll switch to Apple raid soon.

 

[nevinmcconnell]

Confirmed I just took a 4TB Thunderblade v4 -> made it a 16TB yesterday.

Details: replaced the default 4x "1TB OWC Auro Pro" SSDs with 4x "Crucial P3 4TB PCIe Gen3" SSDs. The new ones were a bit thicker (measured with calipers. At the thickest point the OWC SSDs were 1.68mm, -> 2.16mm for the Crucial SSDs) but think the thermal pad had enough squish where it fit back together just fine and now I'm off and running.

Things to note:

1. I got the metal case open successfully pretty easily by removing those 4x screws under the rubber feet, but the circuit board was stuck. I didn't see any additional screws internally, so was pretty sure there was just some adhesive (maybe the thermal pad) holding the circuit board in place. Used a small hair dryer to heat up the unit (tried to blow air UNDER the circuit board) to weaken the adhesive, and it lifted out nicely after only 1-2min of heating it up.
2. Once I replaced the 4x nvme SSDs, I originally formatted with Disk Utility (RAID Assistant) in RAID0 to save money on the SoftRAID license, but then was reminded that SoftRAID will monitor the health of the disk (whereas Disk Utility won't). So I opted for SoftRAID at the end of the day (the cost of the license is worth having a heads up that one of the slots might be failing and I'm about to lose some data /OR/ the drive goes offline until I can replace it, IMO).
3. After I reassembled the unit, I immediately did a speed test and got ~1800MBs write + ~2300MBs read using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
4. Then I transferred 7TB onto the drive (initial time estimate in Finder was 1 hr) when the unit was at room temp.
5. However the transfer definitely slowed down as the data writes generated heat internally in the unit, and after about 4-5TB was a noticeable crawl. Eventually the transfer finished.
6. I reran the disk speed right after the file copy was done, and saw I was getting about ~300MBs write speed (16% of original speeds at room temp!). Let the unit cool down for a few hours and was back up to the ~1800MBs write speed, just FYI!

 

[AdamSeen]

Thanks for the write up. Nice to see it was so easy.

The slowdown might be due to exhausting the drives cache, and making direct writes to the qlc memory - which is very slow, as opposed to heat up. You can find out if that’s the case by checking how much cache it has and when the writes slowed.

If you do want to save some money in future, you can monitor your ssds with https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx which provides accurate monitoring.

 

[jimthing]

Confirmed I just took a 4TB Thunderblade v4 -> made it a 16TB yesterday...

Great insight, thanks. Though as per AdamSeen said, I think if you used TLC rather than QLC nand type NVMe's, those sustained transfer bottlenecks would have at least been reduced, though probably not illuminated entirely. But you got a good bang for buck price no doubt, so it's all subjective on these things. Hope it works for you.

With 8TB sticks becoming fairly affordable, presumably one could achieve the same thing but with even higher total capacity. I wonder when 16TB sticks arrive? At least that'll help lower the 8TB ones prices, even while the 18TB ones themselves will be too high a price initially.

 

[MarckyG]

Interesting thanks.

Thermal paste on each side if the NVMe's, is that right? Or are there also thermal pads of some kind somewhere in addition?

I take it you haven't done this yet though? (Note quite a few Ebay sellers are selling 8TB NVMe's for heavily discounted prices now, especially Corsair ones.). Perhaps the old drives are sellable for something worthwhile to help offset the upgrade cost.

I also wonder if the new SoftRaid v7.5 is finally useable and trustworthy, for those wanting some Raid 5 redundancy out of one of these ThunderBlade boxes?

Super late to the party.... but I had communication with OWC support and did a lot of testing with my Thunderblade:
Regarding Raid 5 (or 4) the Thunderblade will be much slower... sadly the speed I can achieve in Raid 4 and are around 850MB/s write and 2000MB/s read.
Every NVME SSD inside has only 1 lane. So they are limited to around 800 MB/s each, and in Raid 5 the speed is even just 1800MB/s read. The weite speeds are a disappointment... Larry Jordan wrote a great and lengthy review about this too.
So the Thunderblade really is best in Raid 0, but sadly no redundancy.

 

[nevinmcconnell]

Thanks for the write up. Nice to see it was so easy.

The slowdown might be due to exhausting the drives cache, and making direct writes to the qlc memory - which is very slow, as opposed to heat up. You can find out if that’s the case by checking how much cache it has and when the writes slowed.

If you do want to save some money in future, you can monitor your ssds with https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx which provides accurate monitoring.

Yes I was considering that as part of the slowdown issue (cache), but after the 7TB file transfer via MacOS Finder was complete, wouldn’t the NVMe cache be cleared, and the RAID0 ready for a new read/write operation?

Because starting a new read-write operation via Blackmagic Disk Speed test had me assume it had to be something *in addition* to the cache!

 

[AdamSeen]

Yes I was considering that as part of the slowdown issue (cache), but after the 7TB file transfer via MacOS Finder was complete, wouldn’t the NVMe cache be cleared, and the RAID0 ready for a new read/write operation?

Because starting a new read-write operation via Blackmagic Disk Speed test had me assume it had to be something *in addition* to the cache!

The cache wouldn't clear straight away, it has to flush to and write it to the QLC at whatever its max speed is (say 100mb/sec). So would only become more performant again when that is all done, which could take a while.

 

[kraiggers]

Confirmed I just took a 4TB Thunderblade v4 -> made it a 16TB yesterday.

Details: replaced the default 4x "1TB OWC Auro Pro" SSDs with 4x "Crucial P3 4TB PCIe Gen3" SSDs. The new ones were a bit thicker (measured with calipers. At the thickest point the OWC SSDs were 1.68mm, -> 2.16mm for the Crucial SSDs) but think the thermal pad had enough squish where it fit back together just fine and now I'm off and running.

Things to note:

1. I got the metal case open successfully pretty easily by removing those 4x screws under the rubber feet, but the circuit board was stuck. I didn't see any additional screws internally, so was pretty sure there was just some adhesive (maybe the thermal pad) holding the circuit board in place. Used a small hair dryer to heat up the unit (tried to blow air UNDER the circuit board) to weaken the adhesive, and it lifted out nicely after only 1-2min of heating it up.
2. Once I replaced the 4x nvme SSDs, I originally formatted with Disk Utility (RAID Assistant) in RAID0 to save money on the SoftRAID license, but then was reminded that SoftRAID will monitor the health of the disk (whereas Disk Utility won't). So I opted for SoftRAID at the end of the day (the cost of the license is worth having a heads up that one of the slots might be failing and I'm about to lose some data /OR/ the drive goes offline until I can replace it, IMO).
3. After I reassembled the unit, I immediately did a speed test and got ~1800MBs write + ~2300MBs read using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
4. Then I transferred 7TB onto the drive (initial time estimate in Finder was 1 hr) when the unit was at room temp.
5. However the transfer definitely slowed down as the data writes generated heat internally in the unit, and after about 4-5TB was a noticeable crawl. Eventually the transfer finished.
6. I reran the disk speed right after the file copy was done, and saw I was getting about ~300MBs write speed (16% of original speeds at room temp!). Let the unit cool down for a few hours and was back up to the ~1800MBs write speed, just FYI!

Any long term update on this project? I’m thinking about it myself…

 

[OWC_TAL]

A few observations/ notes I thought I could include here:

1. Opening the units can be difficult as thermal compound and thermal pads often hold the SSDs tight to the chassis. IMO this is a good thing- this means that there is thermal contact to wick away the heat. But if one were to open a unit, please be very careful. Using some heat to loosen up the thermal interface definitely helps. I wouldn't recommend opening a unit that is under warranty as damaging the internals would most likely void that. But outside of warranty purposes, we don't control what you do with the hardware.

2. SSDs get hot. Especially higher capacity ones. Our higher capacity Thunderblades have specialized firmware on the SSDs to limit their power consumption (and thus heat). Since there are four SSDs, you don't see a drop in performance the same way you might see in a single blade solution. I believe early production units also could not supply enough current for some higher capacity SSDs. I can't really comment on how other SSDs perform, but just want to give a heads up that excess heat can lead to A) slowdowns and throttling, B) reduced life of the SSDs itself and C) potentially reduced life of the TB hardware. The Thunderblade is entirely passively cooled- if changes you make result in the device getting hotter than before, it would be best to provide some airflow.

3. SoftRAID has some big advantages over AppleRAID. The licensing model has changed in the last year based on user feedback. But a few noticeable improvements of SoftRAID vs AppleRAID are:

1. SoftRAID supports TRIM on all RAID levels. AppleRAID does not support TRIM. TRIM should help with the speeds of your array over time and the longevity of your SSD blades.​

2. SoftRAID is multi-threaded and AppleRAID is not. You will often see better performance with SoftRAID.​

3. SoftRAID has disk failure prediction and notifications. AppleRAID does not. We monitor the drive beyond just SMART statistics.​

4. SoftRAID supports RAID4 and RAID5. Nice to have if you want futher redundancy, but many people tend to stick to RAID0 and do backups very often. Remember, RAID is not a backup. Please always keep your important data in multiple locations.​

5. Multi-OS support. AppleRAID works on, well Apple only systems (unless you have MacDrive installed). But SoftRAID volumes work on Mac and Windows ​

 

[Ifti]

I have several Thunderblade drives, and have had them for several years. I used to use them with FCPX as my main project/editing drives, but I started noticing stuttering here and there with some 4K projects. Although everything still worked, it started getting annoying.

I was actually producing a video on how to upgrade the drives in the Thunderblade, although OWC requested I didnt, so I honored their request in the end.

I have 3 drives - 16TB, 8TB, and 8TB (not upgraded)
Speeds with the Thunderblade from BlackMagic Tests were always around 2200write and 1800read, which I was
RAID0 with SoftRAID.

I then decided to try a OWC Express 1M2 instead.
These things fly - I have 3 of them, 8TB and 8TB are both preinstalled with OWC Aura drives, and the third one was an enclosure within which I put a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB.
All give me consistent speeds with BlackMagic around 3100 read and write.
They have been perfect with editing - no issues whatsoever.

Just like the Thunderblades, they do get warm, although I do tend to stick a desk fan over them when I'm exporting or rendering etc!

I much prefer the simplicity and performance of the 1M2. No large power supply units, no RAID drivers etc to bother with. They've become my go-to drives for editing related tasks.
The Thunderblades are mainly just used for storage now - may sell them if I can't find a better use for them soon.

 

[sunship]

How is the performance with thw Samsung 990 Pro 4TB? Are you using the one with heatsink?

 

[Ifti]

How is the performance with thw Samsung 990 Pro 4TB? Are you using the one with heatsink?

No, you need to use SSDs without any heatsink as otherwise it wont fit - plus it is sandwiched in-between a huge heatsink already.
Performance of the 990Pro has been the same as the pre-installed OWC Aura drives TBH. Speed tests provide the same results, and during general usage I've noticed no ill effects.

You'll see my install and test here:

 

[chars1ub0w]

If Thunderbolt 5 is coming to macs soon, maybe it pays to wait. 8TB NVMe SSDs are more than twice as expensive as 4TB NVMe SSDs. A dual SSD enclosure that supports Thunderbolt 5 would be nice. Meanwhile, I use a single Zike drive with a 4TB Lexar. Would love to have 8TB.

 

[Ifti]

If Thunderbolt 5 is coming to macs soon, maybe it pays to wait. 8TB NVMe SSDs are more than twice as expensive as 4TB NVMe SSDs. A dual SSD enclosure that supports Thunderbolt 5 would be nice. Meanwhile, I use a single Zike drive with a 4TB Lexar. Would love to have 8TB.

I don't think TB5 would make much difference when it comes to external SSDs. I mean, you get high speeds of around 3000 as it is. Sure, TB5 will provide more bandwidth to get higher, but seriously, how much difference are we going to see in normal day to day usage? Very little I would imagine. And TB5 prices/drives will be expensive to start with too.
Where TB5 will shine is with other accessories - higher res displays, and more of them, external GPUs, etc

 

[chars1ub0w]

I don't think TB5 would make much difference when it comes to external SSDs. I mean, you get high speeds of around 3000 as it is.

If you use two drives, you can get double the bandwidth. TB4 is constrained, it cannot handle two drives in parallel. TB5 can. Then external drives can be as fast as the internal SSDs. Save money. Pay less Apple tax for SSDs. No downside in speed.

 

[C-Dubs]

Thanks for this post! I have a 2TB Thunderblade that feels kind of useless at 2TB (shocking) so I plan to make it a 4TB, maybe a 8TB Thunderblade since it's no longer under warranty. I'll update when I do actually do it, but I did want to ask if I could use a Gen 4 SSD in the Gen 3 Thunderblade?

 

[Ifti]

Thanks for this post! I have a 2TB Thunderblade that feels kind of useless at 2TB (shocking) so I plan to make it a 4TB, maybe a 8TB Thunderblade since it's no longer under warranty. I'll update when I do actually do it, but I did want to ask if I could use a Gen 4 SSD in the Gen 3 Thunderblade?

Should be fine