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2TB LaCie Bolt: Uses Two 'Blades' So Can Run as RAID-0 Stripe (default) or RAID-1 Mirror or Two Independent Volumes

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The about $1999 LaCie Bolt 2TB SSD is a heavy serious feeling brick of an SSD—very solidly built. It requires AC power and provides two Thunderbolt 3 ports, so it can be daisy-chained to other devices.

Internally, the LaCie Bolt uses two 'blades' (M2. PCIe SSDs) which by default are a RAID-0 stripe. But it can also be configured as two independent 1TB volumes, or a RAID-1 mirror if desired.

2TB LaCie Bolt: both blades are visible and can be configured as a stripe, mirror, or independently

I was curious how fast a single blade would run.

Read speed averages 1600 MiB/sec = 1678 MB/sec
Write speed averages 577 MiB/sec = 605 MB/sec

The single-blade test is informative: peak read spees are heavily throtted by the limites of the Thunderbolt 3 bus (about 2800 MB/sec). If not for bus bandwidth throttling, the LaCie Bolt would be capable of 3.35 GB/sec.

Write speeds are slower at about 605 MB/sec, which means aboug 1210 MB/sec in a RAID-0 stripe.

Tests with the fill-volume command of https://diglloydtools.comdiglloydTools.

2TB LaCie Bolt: sustained speed across drive capacity for one of the two 'blades'

RAID- 0 Stripe sustained transfer speed

Tests with the fill-volume command of https://diglloydtools.comdiglloydTools.

Read speed averages 2670 MiB/sec = 2809 MB/sec, which is about the limit of the Thunderbolt 3 bus.

Write speed averages 1333 MiB/sec = 1398 MB/sec which trounces the SSD in my 2013 Mac Pro.

2TB LaCie Bolt: sustained speed across drive capacity, Thunderbolt 3 on iMac Pro 10-core 3.0 GHz

RAID-0 stripe speed vs transfer size

The Apple iMac Pro 2TB SSD is at last 2X faster on writes than the LaCie Bolt,

However, the LaCie bolt is faster than the iMac Pro for reads all the way through 1MiB reads! Reads tend to be much more important than writes in most all types of computer usage because data is read far more often than it is written (booting up, launching an app searching, all sorts of things like thgat are all about read speed).

Speed vs transfer size from 32K to 512 GiB, LaCie Bolt 2TB vs Apple iMac Pro 2TB
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