HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8: RAID-4, RAID-0, RAID-5 Scalability

Get HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 or HGST 6TB Deskstar NAS hard drives alone or in the OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID-5 edition.

See the MPG in-depth review of the HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 enterprise-grade hard drive.

RAID-4/5 declines in write performance starting at 7 drives, even on an 8-core 3.3 GHz Mac Pro. Note that machines with fewer CPU cores and/or one Thunderbolt 2 bus (anything but Mac Pro) might do less well than shown here (TBD). It may be a good reason for professionals to stick with at least a 6-core Mac Pro.

RAID-0 striping shows a dropoff at 8 drives also. While there is one laggard in this batch of 8, this is probably not the issue. However, MPG will be retesting the 8-drive scenario with a replacement drive that is coming.

The differences between RAID-4 and RAID-5 are less than the normal variation having to do with drive behaviors, hence one cannot conclude (conclusively) that RAID-4 is faster. However, past testing has consistently shown a slight advantage for read speeds with RAID-4.

Performance of HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 using up to 8 drives in RAID