TESTED: OWC 40TB Thunderbay 4 Mini SSD with RAID-0 Stripe and RAID-4 Fault Tolerance
GetOWC Thunderbay 4 Mini SSD RAID Edition at MacSales.com.
Following up on yesterday’s overview of OWC 40TB Thunderbay 4 Mini SSD, below are performance results with both RAID-0 striping and RAID-5 fault tolerance.
RAID-0 striping
This is the best performance MPG has ever seen with Thunderbolt 2 (or from any external SSD). It sets the new benchmark.
- Read performance flatlines at 1425 MB/sec
- Write performance flatlines at 1192 MB/sec
Those are average figures across across a gigantic 39.37TB volume! Context: those figures beat the internal 1TB SSD in the MPG 2013 Mac Pro. It looks like Thunderbolt 2 has throttled the read performance. MPG expects OWC to offer a similar solution with Thunderbolt 3 in 2017, in which case the read speeds should rise to even higher levels.
RAID-4 (fault tolerance)
This is the best performance MPG has ever seen with Thunderbolt 2 (or from any external SSD). It sets the new benchmark.
- RAID-4 Read performance flatlines at 1224 MB/sec
- RAID-4 Write performance flatlines at 853 MB/sec
The RAID-4 performance is outstanding in two ways:
- Flat line consistency across the entire 29.8TB volume.
- Data rates within a few percent of the theoretical speed, that is, 75% of the speed of RAID-0.
It’s a superlative performance from four SSDs in the Thunderbay 4 Mini witih SoftRAID.
Tested using a> disktester fill-volume --xfer 128M with diglloydTools disktester
Graph shows writes read filling the volume to 99% capacity with 1000 test files.
RAID-0: Write @ 1137 MiB/sec = 1192 MB/sec, Read @ 1359 MiB/sec = 1425 MB/sec
RAID-4: Write @ 814 MiB/sec = 853 MB/sec, Read @ 1167 MiB/sec = 1224 MB/sec
RAID-5: Write @ 814 MiB/sec = 854 MB/sec, Read @ 1003 MiB/sec = 1052 MB/sec