RAID-0 Scalability with Thunderbolt 2: Separate Bus or Daisy Chain?

2014-07-11 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: daisy chaining, Other World Computing, OWC Thunderbay, OWC ThunderBay 4, RAID, RAID scalability, RAID-0, SoftRAID, Thunderbolt, weather events

Following up from the prior research using three OWC Thunderbay 4 units, I wondered what effect using three Thunderbolt 2 busses on the 2013 Mac Pro would have instead of daisy chaining.

The result show that somewhere around 6 drives, daisy chaining starts to break down, even with Thunderbolt 2 as here. Hence careful choice of which devices go on which bus is key for high performance systems (and these are hard drives, not SSDs). It might mean (for example) housing four drives in two enclosures so that each enclosure can have full bandwidth, e.g. for SSDs.

Also, in spite of its two ports, the late 2013 MacBook Pro has only one Thunderbolt bus, so it maxes out quickly. As of this writing only the 2013 Mac Pro offers more than one Thunderbolt 2 bus.

RAID-0 striping scalability using OWC Thunderbay 4 with 5TB hard drives