OWC Thunderbay 4 with Four OWC SSDs as RAID-0 Stripe

OWC Thunderbay

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.

OWC Thunderbay 4 (Thunderbolt 2) performance with RAID-0 stripe of four OWC SSDs

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