RAID-5 with 4 / 3 Hard Drives (SoftRAID, Thunderbolt v1)

OWC Thunderbay

Various configurations starting at about $499 without drives.
Thunderbay RAID-5 edition also available.

Tests shown here uses the fastest portion of the drives in order to show the peak speeds possible with the Thunderbay; all hard drives slow down as they fill up, as per the simple physical fact of πD (track circumference).

The Thunderbay performed admirably, as did the Toshiba MG03ACA300 hard drives, which offer very impressive performance.

Results

Tested with the Thunderbay IV (Thunderbolt, not Thunderbolt 2).

SoftRAID 5 beta was used in order to explore the performance of RAID 5.

The OWC Thunderbay was tested using four Toshiba MG03ACA300 hard drives. These are very fast drives as of 2014.

Tests performed using DiskTester, specifically the fill-volume command.

Results shown are real-world throughput through the file system API (not unachievable driver-level throughput).

Even with only three drives, throughput is excellent, with four drives raising speed to impressive levels.

RAID 5 X 4: 534 / 563	write/read MB/sec  (four drives)
RAID 5 X 3: 367 / 374 write/read MB/sec  (three drives)

OWC Thunderbay performance with RAID-5 (striping with parity)