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RAID-5 vs RAID-4 with SSDs
Related: Other World Computing, OWC Thunderbay, RAID, RAID-4, RAID-5, SSD, storage, Thunderbolt, video

Thunderbay Mini configurations start at about $379 without drives. Thunderbay Mini RAID-5 edition also available.
RAID-4 is striping with a dedicated parity drive
RAID-5 is striping with distributed parity
MPG tested the throughput of the OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini using DiskTester run-sequential-suite on a late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina (Thunderbolt 2).
disktester run-sequential-suite --xfer-steps 4 --test-size 2G--starting-xfer 64K --ending-xfer 256MB
With 4 OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs, RAID-4 outperforms RAID-5 by about 10% for reads (compare green and blue lines). Write performance is identical.
Findings might or might apply to hard drives, whose performance characteristics differ from SSDs.

Filling the entire volume with disktester fill-volume, observe that write speed for RAID-4 and RAID-5 is identical on SSDs. But read speed is about 12% higher for RAID-4.
disktester fill-volume --xfer 128M
