OWC Thunderbay 4 with Four OWC SSDs in RAID-5

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 in a fault-tolerant configuration of RAID-5?

The OWC Thunderbay 4 was tested using using four 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs.

RAID-5 using SoftRAID 5

More about SoftRAID 5.

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: 648/1108	write/read MB/sec  (4 SSDs in 1 enclosure)
  Dual: 689/1258	write/read MB/sec  (4 SSDs in 2 enclosures)

The performance is superb in either configuration, but even RAID-5 benefits from the dual enclosure setup. Write speed is much lower than read speed (typical for RAID-5), but it is well beyond what most applications can use Read speed is a match for the internal Mac Pro flash drive so to have that speed with fault-tolerance is very impressive.

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-5 of four OWC SSDs

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