In the benchmark test, we used the software BlackMagic Disk Speed Test from the Mac App Store. The software is ran 3 times in RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD.
Test Environment
13″ MacBook Air, 13-inch
1.8GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7
4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
256GB flash storage
Below are the results :
RAID 0
The results for RAID 0 is pretty impressive at 243MB/s READ and WRITE. It can be clearly seen that the bottleneck isn’t in the Thunderbolt interface but the drives. In fact, have you seen any SATA 6Gbps drive give you 600MB/s be it a single or in a RAID array (unless you are talking abt SSD).
JBOD
When configured it as a JBOD, the performance gose down to 119.8MB/s. Compared to a traditional USB 2.0 interface, you would barely reach even 25MBps. Even a USB 3.0 would not give you anything beyond 60MBps.
RAID 1
RAID 1 is slower than JBOD as it requires the writing to two disk for mirroring the contents. The speed dropped to 112.8MBps and 117.6MBps for Write and Read. As we have mentioned before, the speed is still remarkable compared to USB 3.0.
Big deal, Apple has already said that desktops are dead, so that means this is dead.
Any true computer user, uses a Desktop PC, and stays away from the proprietary junk made by Apple.