Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid Review: Storage Rugged and Speedy Thunderbolt 3

Price during the examination

$ 530 (8 to) | $ 680 (16 TB) | $ 900 (24 TB) | $ 1,000 (32 TB) | $ 1,150 (40 TB) | $ 1,350 (44 to) | $ 1,700 (48 TB)

Best prices today: Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid

Whenever I review a product that has hard drives readers (hard drives), I sing the same song: a lot of capacity for much less than the SSDs and better performance than you think.

I would not want to execute my operating system on a box like the Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid (HDDS offers lazy random access), but I would certainly use it for audio or video production where the sequential transfer speed is essential. 550 Mbps in RAID 0 will easily do the trick in most scenarios.

The puzzle of the hard drive against SSD

But there is a warning: the raid striped 0 which offers that 550 Mbps offers no redundancy. Hard records, although much more reliable than before, are always mechanical and, therefore, more prone to failure than to much faster SSD. The operation of hard disks in mirror pairs is much safer, but half as fast and half the capacity.

The result is that, although the storage of the hard disk is cheaper, once you fully explain the higher possibility of the reader's failure, it does not like it. More about this in the cost section.

Note that even if I feel obliged to underline the fragility of the hard drives, I had a pair of HDD of 16 TB running 16 hours a day in a Box NAS for almost seven years, with a suspicion of everything that is unfortunate. That said, I mirror them because of some bad experiences at the time.

This does not mean that the SSDs never miss. They do it on rare occasions, although most of the time recovery is simply a question of resetting the controller.

GLYPHBOX PRO RAID GLYPHBOX FUNCTIONS

A built black metal box (then) in silicone blasked metal, the Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid is a Thunderbolt 3 speaker with 3.5 -inch training bays that are easy to open of 3.5 inches. It has been sold pre-packed to capabilities of 8 TB to 48 TB. Keep in mind that the advertised capacity is the sum of the two discs when used on stripes or separately.

Including the silicone sleeve, the Blackbox Pro Raid measures approximately 8.5 inches long by 4 inches wide by 5.25 inches high. By his lonely, he weighs 5.1 pounds, making a ball at around 8.1 pounds when hard drives are added. The AC adapter, with its matching silicone jacket, adds another book.

Jon L. Jacobi

At the rear of the unit are a full-size DisplayPort port, two Thunderbolt 3 ports (type-C), fashion switches, a RAID fashion game switch, a Kensington locking port and DC power outlet.

If you are wondering why 3 GBPS Thunderbolt 3 with 550 Mbps hard drives, the display port and an optional USB / Card Card center are the reason. Or of course, a few other USB and Ethernet ports at the rear could have stiff this justification, in my opinion.

The ProDevue Blackbox Raid facilitates switching methods (Raid 0 striped, raid 1 mirror, jbod or independent): simply reorientation the mini double-dip switches as a function of diagrams directly above them, then press and hold the reset button for four seconds.

Being very slightly paranoid (not without cause), it seems a little too easy because the reset button is not embedded. But pressing the said button has no effect unless you have changed the DIP switches.

Glyph guarantees that the Blackbox Pro Raid for three years with a promise to recover data for two years and the replacement of parts for one. I haven't seen a shock, but I never dropped a hard drive box, and never move it while it is powered.

Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid

The Blackbox Pro Raid costs $ 600 with 8 TB, $ 780 with 16 TB, $ 1000 with 24 TB, $ 1,100 with 32 TB, $ 1,400 with the 40 TB that I tested, $ 1550 with 44 TB and $ 1900 with 48 TB.

These have been reduced to $ 530 /8 TB, $ 680 /16 TB, $ 900 /24 TB, $ 1000 /32 TB, $ 1150 /40 TB, $ 1,350 / 44 TB and $ 1,700 / 48 TB. Unfortunately, the box is not available not populated, there is therefore no profit of hard drives that you may have dragged.

The Blackbox Pro Raid is also available with an integrated I / O center with CFAST 2.0 and SD locations, as well as a 10 Gbit / s USB port. Add $ 40 at $ 100 depending on the capacity you order. Why, this price variance for the same option as I cannot tell you.

The speaker is a price slightly lower than that of OWC Gemini, although the Gemini have a few more ports. Gemini is also available without a reader for $ 300 and with a version of 4 TB for $ 470 – Configurations that the Blackbox Pro Raid does not offer. The G-Raid mirror has a NVME NVME Pro-Lame NVME port and is also a little more than the Blackbox Pro Raid.

Jon L. Jacobi

As I discussed previously, compared to the SSDs, the Blackbox Pro Raid appears cheap. A single SSD NVME of 8 TB in an enclosure is $ 600 / $ 700, which is competitive as such. But adding four of them to get 32 ​​TB would cost you $ 2400 as opposed to $ 1100, the Blackbox Pro 32 TB raid puts you back.

And it is before paying $ 250 Plus for a box of NVME raid like the OWC 4m2 – if you can find it. I went to get the 4m2 and it is apparently EOL, to be replaced by something faster in the near future. I could suggest the OWC Thunderblade, but it's $ 800 for four locations, which even makes a pair of Blackbox Pro Raid.

To emphasize again, the reliability of the hard drive is much better than before, but you should probably run the Blackbox Pro Raid in mirror or by pairs for something other than scratch storage.

This is the cost of $ 2200 for two pro Blackbox 32 TOs against $ 2700 at $ 3,200 for 32 TB of SSD NVME. Cheaper, but not as much. Considering that the massive boost of SSDS Book performance, well …

Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid Performance

Although the Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid was not as fast as OWC Gemini in our tests, keep in mind that I tested the OWC box with a very fast hard of hard records of 24 TB Ultrastar DC HC580. The 40 TO glyph BLACKBOX PRO RAID sent us still used quickly, but slightly more commonplace of 20 to Toshiba MG10ACA20TE.

In any case, reading 532 Mbps and the writing of 511 Mbps in Raid with striped 0, as measured by the speed test of the Blackmagicdesign disk are a very good performance. The same goes for reading 271 Mbps and 254 Mbps writing in Mirror Raid 1 mode.

Amorphousdiskmark 4 evaluated the RAID Blackbox Pro in RAID 0 as a slightly faster reading of 540 Mbps and a little slower 490 MBPS. The performance of 273 Mbps / 259 Mbps in the Raid 1 are almost exactly half as it is normally.

The story was roughly the same (as planned) of the Atto Disk Benchmark. Note that the rule on the left in the screen captures below goes from 1 Gbit / s for the RAID0 to 500 Mbps maximum in the RAID 1 test.

I also executed the Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid via the PCworld test with largely the same results. The OWC Gemini was faster, but the G-Raid mirror was much slower in Raid 0. The low scores of the latter were a puzzler because this box used the same HDD HDD HC580 WD DC HC580 at 24 TB like Gemini.

I included the numbers of random performance as a small dose of lightness. Modern SSDs exceed these results a hundredfold. If you are young enough not to remember hard drives, that's what we had to face. After of course, upgrade of the floppy disks.

The Glyph Black Box Pro Raid has succeeded very well in our 4 GB transfers otherwise as well as OWC Gemini in certain tests. Again, the laziness of the G-Raid mirror laziness, also a Thunderbolt 3 box was a mystery.

The hierarchical order remained intact after the writing of 450 GB, the Blackbox Pro Raid a path behind in second place.,

Overall, I was very satisfied with the performance of Blackbox Pro Raid. Given the advantage of slightly faster WD hard drives in the OWC, I would call the boxes themselves about peer performance.

Should you buy the Glyph Blackbox Pro Raid?

If you want a maximum capacity for the least dollars, the Blackbox Pro Raid is an excellent product. Largely tied with OWC Gemini, and faster than the G-Raid mirror.

But I would plan to execute it twinned with another or in mirror mode for data security, which powerfully reduces the aspect of the good deal. Anyway, a large dual dual enclosure.