Glyph Blackbox Pro RAID: Rugged and speedy Thunderbolt 3 storage

The 550MBps transfer rate striped) this dual-hard drive RAID box delivers is nothing to sneeze at.

- BY JON JACOBI

Every time I review a product that features hard disk drives (HDDs), I sing the same tune: lots of capacity for a lot less than SSDs, and better performance than you might think.

I wouldn't want to run my operating system off a box like the Glyph Blackbox Pro RAID, fave.co/449lt1f (HDDS offers slothful random access), but I'd certainly use it for audio or video production where sequential transfer speed is paramount 550MBps in RAID 0 will easily do the trick in most scenarios.

THE HDD VERSUS SSD CONUNDRUM

But there's a caveat: The striped RAID 0 that delivers that 550MBps offers no redundancy. HDDs, while far more reliable than they used to be, are still mechanical and hence more prone to failure than far faster SSDs. Operating HDDs in mirrored pairs is far safer, but half as fast and half the capacity.

The upshot is that while HDD storage is cheaper, once you fully account for the higher possibility of drive failure, that's not by as much as it might at first seem-more on that in the cost section.

Note that while I feel compelled to point out the frailty of HDDs, I've had a pair of 16TB HDDs running 16 hours a day in a NAS box for almost seven years, with nary a hint of anything untoward. That said, I run them mirrored due to a couple of bad experiences back in the day.

This is not to say that SSDs never fail.

They do on rare occasions (fave.co/3D7Asrb), though most of the time recovery is simply a matter of a controller reset.

FEATURES

A sturdily constructed (and then some) black metal box jacketed in silicone, the Glyph Blackbox Pro RAID is a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure sporting dual, easy-open 3.5-inch drive bays It's sold pre- populated in 8TB to 48TB capacities.