GRAPH LEGEND
rr2722 6 Tiger SAS = Six Tiger 2TB SATA III 2.5" SSDs mounted in two FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4 four bay eSATA enclosures connected to a HighPoint RocketRAID 2722 x8 SAS/SATA host adapter in slot #2 of 2010 Mac Pro; SoftRAID 5.07 created RAID 0 set
Areca 6 Tiger TB2 = Six Tiger 2TB SATA III 2.5" SSDs mounted mounted in the Areca ARC-5028T2 6-Bay Thunderbolt 2 RAID Enclosure connected to a Thunderbolt 2 port of a 2013 Mac Pro; RAID 0 set created using LCD panel on enclosure
AKiTiO 4 Tiger TB2 = Four Tiger 2TB SATA III 2.5" SSDs mounted in the AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad Mini 4-bay enclosure connected to the Thunderbolt 2 port of a 2013 Mac Pro; SoftRAID 5.07 created RAID 0 set.
LARGE SEQUENTIAL TRANSFER TEST
We used AJA System Test to benchmark file level sequential transfer speed using a 16GB test file (and 4K frame size). RED graph bar means the fastest overall in Megabytes per Second.
INSIGHTS
The fastest RAID 0 setup requires a 'muscular' SAS host bus adapter (HBA) like the RocketRAID 2722 (or 2744) running in a Mac Pro tower, as you can see from the AJA System test (large sequential) results.
And since the RocketRAID 2722 SAS/SATA host adapter manages the RAID set, you have multiple options for drive enclosures. For our benchmarking, we split the 6 Tigers between a pair of 4 bay FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4 eSATA enclosures. You could also use the Stardom SOHOTANK ST8-U5 8-bay as your RAID enclosure with a mini-SAS port for each set of 4 bays. Ditto for the Areca ARC-8040.
For the 2013 Mac Pro with Thunderbolt 2 ports, maximum real-world large sequential data transfer speed (per bus) is 1350MB/s. So no matter how many SSDs you stripe or how fast the SSDs are, when you have the RAID enclosure connected to a single Thunderbolt 2 port, that's as good as it gets -- as you can see from the Areca and AKiTiO Thunderbolt 2 RAID enclosure AJA System test results. The only way to go faster with a Thunderbolt 2 RAID 0 setup is to use multiple enclosures and bridge them across multiple Thunderbolt 2 buses (like we did with the LaCie Little Big Disk TB2 in a this article).
On the other hand, though the Areca six Tiger setup was slightly faster than the AKiTiO for small random transfers. And don't forget that six 2TB Tigers in a RAID 0 set provide 12TB solid state storage capacity.
Feedback or comments? Feel free to email me,
Also, you can follow me on Twitter @barefeats
