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OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual: Performance with 2 X 18TB Hard Drives

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB-C

MPG tested the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB-C in various configurations using two Western Digital 18TB hard drives, which are the fastest hard drives MPG has ever tested.

This page looks at performance of dual Western Digital 18TB hard drives used simultaneously in the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB-C.

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Sustained performance over 18TB capacity, two drives

Test mule was the 2018 Mac mini connected to a dedicated Thunderbolt 3 port/bus. 10 Gbps bandwidth verified.

For over 12 years, DiskTester has been the best means available to ascertain how a drive performs across its capacity. When working with RAID, graphing each hard drive individually can reveal performance irregularities that can cause hiccups in RAID performance when multiple drives are used—problem drives can be swapped out for better ones.

Hard drives slow down as they fill up, so a key way to evaluate hard drive is by its speed across its capacity. The Western Digital 18TB hard drive is the fastest MPG has ever tested as of early 2021, so this is the best one can expect.

Also, when using RAID, it is important to use hard drives matched in performance, lest one slow-down the combined throughput. Accordingly the fill-volume command of diglloydTools Disktester was used here to simultaneously test the two Western Digital 18TB hard drives.

The overall performance is fantastic for hard drives. To nitpick a little, a tiny bit more performance can be eked out with a single drive on the OWC Mercury Elite Pro single-drive enclosure, as tested. It might be that the controller in the Dual unit has just a bit of overhead with two drives used together on on SATA bus (or that the SATA bus itself is at issue, since it pegs out at 600 MB/sec theoretical, and 2 X 270 MB/sec = 540 MB/sec is near that limit.

The two samples have identical write speeds, and nearly identical read speeds. This is as tight a performance as MPG has ever seen for hard drives—superb, and ideally suited for RAID.

Average Write speed:  221, 221 MB/sec
Average Read speed:   225, 224 MB/sec

Vertical scale MB/sec. Horizontal scale percentage of volume capacity. Red/orange for writes, green/blue for reads.
Data using fill-volume command of diglloydTools Disktester.

Western Digital 18TB hard drive: speed vs transfer size, two sample simultaneously in OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual USB-C enclosure
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