OWC Thunderbay FLEX 8: SSD Speed Across Volume Capacity

2020-09-05 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: Other World Computing, OWC Thunderbay, OWC ThunderBay FLEX 8, RAID, RAID-0, SSD, storage, Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 3, weather events

OWC ThunderBay FLEX 8

MPG tested the OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 with four 2TB SSDs and four Toshiba 4TB MG04ACA hard drives. Configurations up to 128TB (8 X 16TB) possible.

This page evaluates RAID-0 stripe performance of the OWC FLEX 8 across the entire capacity of the 8TB SSD volume (4 X 2TB SSD).

CLICK TO VIEW: Example OWC Thundebay FLEX 8 Configurations

Test results: RAID-0 across volume capacity

Test mule was the 2018 Mac mini. The fill-volume command of diglloydTools Disktester was used. Tested with 4 X 2TB SSDs using SoftRAID 5.8.4.

disktester fill-volume

The RAID-0 stripe of 4 X 2TB SSD (8TB volume) delivers a consistent 2.64 GB/sec real-world throughput through file system APIs, which is very close to the limit of the Thunderbolt 3 bus (2.75 GB/sec) and identical to the performance of the OWC Thunderblade.

Average RAID-0 MB/sec: 2636 write, 2638 read

Vertical scale is MB/sec. Horizontal scale shows percentage of volume capacity, e.g., 50% is 4TB used of 8TB.

OWC ThunderBay FLEX 8: RAID-0 SSD performance
4 X 2TB NVM.e SSD