OWC ThunderBlade V4 Review (4TB) – Worlds Fastest External Storage

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.05

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

Performance of 2.4GB/s read and 2.2GB/s write may be a touch below listed specifications, but this is a great start as the OWC ThunderBlade V4 is already the most powerful external storage medium that we have ever tested.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 5..5.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

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Things are looking better with 2.6GB/s read and 2.4GB/s write but we have to admit concern with respect to the low 4K read performance.  Although we understand that the ThunderBlade V4 is geared towards media storage and manipulation, the result of 10MB/s for 4k read hasn’t been seen since the days of the HDD.  Let’s keep this in mind when we do some real world data transfers.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.9

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance. For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

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AS much as the low 4K read hits us once again, surpassing 2GB/s read and write throughput and making 300K write IOPS is pretty impressive.  The Copy Bench particularly impressed us where we saw incredible transfer speeds for ISO and game files.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today. The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.

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One comment

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    Come on, 3 years?? That should be ONE star!!!! That is a joke! Should be at least 5 year warranty, or better 10 years for that price. For the 3 year warranty, forget it, I will build my own and will be 10 year warranty for the ssd. And it will not bog down with a lot of writes like this one.

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