Performance and RAID modes
All tests were performed on a PC with the i7-11700K processor, MSI Z590I Unify motherboard, 32GB DDR4-3600 RAM, and Windows 10 Pro with the latest updates.
The DA2 Thunderbolt 3 Plus has been tested with two Kingston DC500M 1.92TB SSDs. These SSDs are designed for mixed-load use, so they offer both high read and high write performance. They also provide high endurance, so they are recommended for a professional environment.
Performance in a single drive configuration
Let’s begin with a CrystalDiskMark and a single drive.
The maximum bandwidth of a single SATA SSD is about as high as connected directly to the computer’s motherboard. We could reach up to 554MB/s read bandwidth, and 521MB/s write bandwidth.
A bit worse results are in the ATTO Disk Benchmark. 530MB/s is still a good result.
More demanding tests like PCMark 10 storage benchmarks are showing pretty good performance in a mixed load environment. Since it’s a single SATA drive, we can’t count on very high scores, but it’s still significantly better than an HDD.
Performance Test 10 shows around 437MB/s what is already less but still good for work.
Even Anvil’s Storage Utilities shows quite good results.
Performance in RAID 0
RAID 0 offers us the highest performance and added capacity, so two SSD have in total around 3.57TB. However, if one of the drives fails, we lose all the data, so it’s not recommended if we work on more important data.
CrystalDiskMark could reach as high as 860MB/s bandwidth, 50MB/s more than the maximum declared in the TD2 specifications. That’s an excellent result.
Random operations could be higher, but it’s still not bad.
Also, ATTO Disk Benchmark could pass declared bandwidth, with the peak throughput of 893MB/s! Here we have 83MB/s more than the declared maximum speed.
What is a bit surprising, a performance in PCMark 10 storage benchmarks is lower than that of a single drive. This is how SSDs often act in random operations, but I was expecting at least as high performance as on a single drive.
Performance Test 10 could reach 622MB/s what is again a nice bandwidth.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities shows slightly higher bandwidth than the Performance Test, passing 668MB/s.
Performance in RAID 1
RAID 1 is the most interesting mode as it’s recommended and popular in NAS or DAS devices.
CrystalDiskMark shows about as high performance as on a single drive and even slightly higher write bandwidth. This was expected. However, the same drives connected directly to the motherboard were performing better.
ATTO results are also as high as on a single drive. We have to remember that the TD2 writes data simultaneously on two SSD.
Mixed load tests show performance about as high as on a single drive but higher than in RAID 0. It suggests that RAID 1 is better because of data protection and performance in more demanding operations. If we make direct, sequential data copies, then RAID 0 will be faster.
Once again, Performance Test 10 gives us over 400MB/s but nothing really exceptional.
The same story is in Anvil’s Storage Utilities. As far as the results are high, then we could expect better.
The TD2 Thunderbolt 3 Plus performs well in all scenarios. I could expect better performance in random operations, but we can’t complain as overall results are still high. RAID 1 is the recommended mode, in which we have a copy of the data and pretty good performance that should be enough for most tasks.
