High-performance, high-capacity storage is at the heart of everything we do as media editors. Clearly, performance improves with each generation of gear. Equally clearly, none of us have unlimited budgets; we tend to hang on to storage as long as possible.
One of my key archiving systems is a Thunderbolt 2 RAID 5 containing four Seagate Iron Wolf drives. Last week, I purchased a new Thunderbolt 3 RAID system to replace it, which gave me the opportunity to compare the speeds between the two.
I thought: “None of these RAIDs are fast enough to fill a Thunderbolt 2 or 3 pipe. So, since they have the same number of SATA drives, maybe there won’t be any speed difference between the two of them?”
The short answer: Thunderbolt 3 is 1.4 – 1.6X faster than Thunderbolt 2, given the same number of drives and RAID format. I did two tests: one for RAID 0 and one for RAID 5.
Here is the comparison between Thunderbolt 2 vs. Thunderbolt 3 for a 4-drive RAID 0 – a 1.6X improvement in speed!
However, to protect against drive failure, RAID 5 is more common. so here is a comparison between Thunderbolt 2 vs. Thunderbolt 3 for a 4-drive RAID 5 – a 1.4X improvement in speed.
What this means is that when you upgrade older gear to newer, you’ll see a significant speed bump providing faster file transfers, renders, and exports.
While no HDD RAID is as fast as an SSD, no SSD has the capacity or long-term storage ability of an HDD. They both need to exist. And, now, we know investing in new gear pays benefits in terms of faster performance and, depending upon the size of any new drives we buy, greater capacity.
NOTE: Just to be clear, you can’t upgrade storage from Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3. It requires buying new hardware due to significantly different chip sets. But, when you DO upgrade, you’ll see a performance benefit, even for the same number of HDD drives.
EXTRA CREDIT
