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OWC Thunderbay 4 with Four OWC SSDs as RAID-0 Stripe
Related: Other World Computing, OWC Thunderbay, OWC ThunderBay 4, RAID, RAID-0, SSD, storage, Thunderbolt, video
OWC Thunderbay has configurations starting at about $499 without drives. Thunderbay RAID-5 edition also available.
How fast can the OWC Thunderbay 4 (Thunderbolt 2) perform on the 2013 Mac Pro? when maxed-out for speed as a RAID-0 stripe?
The OWC Thunderbay 4 was tested using using four 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs.
RAID-0 stripe
Tests performed with DiskTester, using the fill-volume command.
Results shown are real-world throughput through the file system API (not unachievable driver-level throughput).
The “Single” results configured all four SSDs in one Thunderbay 4 enclosure. The “Dual” results used two Thunderbay 4 enclosures with two SSDs each. Each enclosure was on a different bus on the 2013 Mac Pro.
Single: 1158/1256 write/read MB/sec (4 SSDs in 1 enclosure)
Dual: 1545/1749 write/read MB/sec (4 SSDs in 2 enclosures)
Thunderbolt 2 apparently runs out of bandwidth, with one bus not being quite enough for full performance from fast SSDs. Or it could be a limitation of the Thunderbay 4—unclear. Two enclosures definitely improve the top end.
This is a lot of speed, way beyond what most programs can use (due to internal application bottlenecks).
Speed might be lower with incompressible data, as per Sandforce-based SSDs, but there is more than ample performance here.
