If you love Macs as much as I do, then you don’t even bat an eye when it comes to upgrading your prized possession. But not only upgrades can speed up your Mac. Ever thought of buying a new Thunderbolt external hard drive? If you pick just the right one, it will make your Mac do that swoosh sound that Superman does when he flies wearing his cape – it’s all the time, by the way.
How about a thunderbolt SSD drive?
The world’s your oyster my dear friend, you just need to know where to look. Take a look just down below, and see what tickles your fancy.
We’re going to talk about Thunderbolt External Hard Drive, and SSDs racks!
The Best Thunderbolt External Hard Drive
OWC ThunderBay 4 Raid
It comes equipped with four 3.5″ drive bays, and it can go up to 32 TB; the overwhelming Thunderbolt 2 experience, which offers speeds over 1.3GB/s; you can easily configure it in Raid 0, 1, 4, 5 & 1+0.Because it has an aluminium case it dissipates heat easily, and it’s also super-quiet, so you don’t need to worry that you’ll wake up the entire block when you power it up.
It was featured as one of the finalist in Stevie’s 2015 Awards.
The base 4TB model which consists of four 1 TB hard drives, and 128MB cache will cost you about $749.
If you need more Thunderbolt storage, you can choose between 8TB, 12TB, 16TB, 20TB, 24TB, and 32TB models. The most expensive one is, of course, the 32TB model which will make you cough up $3,249.
They all come packed with SoftRAID 5.
If you’re looking for more bang for your buck, you can even buy a thunderbolt external enclosure kit – which will cost you about $479.
Click here to check OWC ThunderBay 4 Raid
OWC ThunderBay 4
It’s the younger brother of the previously discussed Thunderbolt external hard drive. It has four 3.5″ drive bays, that can go up to 24 TB. The same awesome Thunderbolt 2 experience that can go up to 1.3GB/s speeds. It’s also has that great aluminium case that it uses to easily dissipate heat.
The OWC ThunderBay 4 is plug and play RAID-ready.
It can be equipped with Thunderbolt drives that can reach a maximum of 24TB. The base model of 4TB, with 128MB of cache costs $679, and the one with the most storage, 24TB is $1,919.
The thunderbolt external enclosure kit costs $419.
Click here to check OWC ThunderBay 4
OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini
The OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini comes in two models.
- ThunderBay 4 mini with Thunderbolt SSD
- ThunderBay 4 mini with Thunderbolt Hard Drives
The Thunderbolt SSD model is indeed way faster than its HDD counterpart, but it doesn’t have the same amount of storage space.
These devices are top-notch, but it depends on what you prefer. Quantity, or speed.The first model, the SSD one, comes with four 2.5″ drive bays designed especially for solid state drives, the revolutionary Thunderbolt 2 experience, and guess what? It’s even more silent than what devices we discussed before.It’s also RAID-ready.It comes in four different models. A 500 GB one split into four 120GB Extreme Pro SSDs, costing you $764. The following models are 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. The last one, which is the maximum the Mini can uphold, has four 1TB Electra 6G SSDs, and it costs $2,279.
It has a built-in Thunderbolt SSD enclosure.
For this kind of money you get a 3 year warranty, and a sustained speed of up to 1,3GB/s – and upwards.
The Thunderbolt External Hard Drive Mini Rack comes in three different models. The base one stands at 2TB split into four 500 GB 7200RPM drives, and it costs $580. The next models are 4TB, and 8TB. The maximum you can achieve is 8TB of storage which is split into four 2 TB HDD at 5400 RPM, and it costs $875.
The thing is, it only has 5400 RPM, which is definitely way slower than the 7200 RPM one. I’m not even going to discuss how slow it is compared with a SSD. If I were you, I would either go with the SSD one, or the external Thunderbolt storage that stands at 7200 RPM, with 4 TB.
Click here to check OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini
Bonus: Unite your Thunderbolt Peripherals!
Under one banner of course. Have you ever heard of the OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock?It has 12 ports which you can use, and it comes equipped with the sought-after Dual Thunderbolt 2 ports, which you can use for daisy chain support. It goes without question that it supports ULTRA-HD 4K, and multiple displays. It comes equipped with five USB 3.0 ports, two of which are high-power.
FireWire 800 is present for connecting other external storage, or legacy devices.
It’s $230.
Click here to check OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock