How fast are Four Hitachi 7K3000 3TB Hard Drives in a RAID-0 Stripe?

2011-05-07 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: hard drive, How-To, RAID, RAID-0

Hard drives slow down as they fill up, which is why larger hard drives are much faster for the same amount of data to be stored.

Use 3TB hard drives not just for capacity, but for much higher performance for any given amount of data.

The DiskTester fill-volume command (part of diglloydTools) was used to test this RAID-0 stripe of four Hitachi 7K3000 3TB hard drives in a 3.33 GHz Mac Pro 6-core. It emits graphable data to show the performance across the volume.

This kind of performance is perfect for speeding up saves of big Photoshop files.

Of course, fast 6G SSDs can be striped as well. However, the Mac Pro motherboard SATA bandwidth maxes-out around 640 MB/sec.

MB/sec, higher is faster
4-drive RAID-0 stripe of Hitachi 7K3000 3TB hard drives