I ordered 4 8TB M.2 SSDs from Amazon. I ordered a Thunderbolt 3 4 drive housing called the 4M2 from OWC. The SSDs came with heat sinks. The housing came with a fan. There’s no room for the fan when the heat sinks are present.
Here’s a look at the housing with two of the 8TB drives installed along with one 4TB drive with no heatsink. The outer case is under the inner one.
Here’s what it looks like with all four 8TB drive installed, all plugged in and ready to go, but missing the outer skin.
My intent was to use SoftRAID to set the array up for striping. But when I fired up SoftRAID, this is what I saw:
That happened over and over. I submitted a report.
I have found SoftRAID to be flakey on several Win 10 and Win 11 computers. I jettisoned SoftRAID and used Windows 11 to format the striped array.
The benchmarks look pretty good for reads — about half the speed of the internal M.2 SSD on the computer. Write performance isn’t very good. Some throttling may have taken place during the benchmark test.
I populated the disk with about 17 TB of data. During that operation, it throttled the write stream to keep the drive temperature to about 70 degrees Celsius.
It would be nice to find an array enclosure that accommodated fans with the heat sinks present.
Do you need to move the array between computers? If not a pcie x16 m.2 carrier card will give you a lot more performance than thunderbolt and let you utilize the case’s airflow (assuming the 7865 has airflow over pcie compartment)
I have, and am planning on installing, an OWC 32 TB PCIe x16 card.
I added an extra fan to my system using vhb tape to hold it in place over my raid card. For my next system I’m looking at 8tb m.2 tlc drives as you did, but internally so I’m following your software raid with interest. Also interested in the graid coprocessor to speed up raid5 writes