OWC Thunderbay FLEX 8: HDD Speed vs Transfer Size

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 16TB volume (4 X 4TB hard drives).

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 4TB hard drives using SoftRAID 5.8.4.

disktester fill-volume

The RAID-0 stripe of 4 X 4TB hard drives (16TB volume) delivers strong small transfer size speed which is significantly faster than a single drive—no striping occurs with 32K and 64K blocks, so any improvement is very welcome.

Starting with 128K transfers, speed rockets upward but 128K is still only 2 drives of the stripe involved for the transfer. At 256KB transfers, all 4 drives get used (256K = 4 X 64K) and full speed of ~820 MB/sec is achieved.

OWC ThunderBay FLEX 8: RAID-0 SSD performance, speed vs transfer size
4 X 2TB NVM.e SSD