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Raid 5 enclosure benchmarks

W

wiski15b

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 20, 2016
118
8
Hey everyone,

Im looking to buy an external enclosure for my Mac Pro equipped with esata/USB 3 connections. I would like to set it up in raid 10 or 5 with carbon copy cloner. Wise choice, dumb decision, thoughts, recommendations? I was wondering if anyone has some benchmarks to share?

Thanks,
Matt
 
Last edited:
I have a Elite Pro Qx2 not currently in use, but it has worked well using both eSATA and USB 3.0 interfaces and using the hardware RAID-5 as well as JBOD with SoftRAID5. It isn't the fastest hardware around, but it performed well for me and didn't have any USB 3.0 disconnects during sleep (it went into sleep mode as well). I have some old Seagate 3TB drives in it and I found some old DiskSpeedTest files as follows:

Left: eSATA Hardware RAID5 .......................... Right: USB 3.0 Hardware RAID5
Qx2_RAID5_9TB_Seagate3TB.png Qx2_RAID5_9TB_USB3.png
 
hfg said:
I have one not currently in use, but it has worked well using both eSATA and USB 3.0 interfaces and using the hardware RAID-5 as well as JBOD with SoftRAID5. It isn't the fastest hardware around, but it performed well for me and didn't have any USB 3.0 disconnects during sleep (it went into sleep mode as well). I have some old Seagate 3TB drives in it and I found some old DiskSpeedTest files as follows:

Left: eSATA Hardware RAID5 .......................... Right: USB 3.0 Hardware RAID5
View attachment 629476 View attachment 629477
Click to expand...
Thanks HFG! Raid 5 seems to perform better than I thought it would on this unit. From what I understand owc has this units max transfer speeds at sata 2 speeds (300 MB/s), no matter what configuration either on USB 3 or esata.
 
Just for kicks, I hooked it up again in JBOD mode and used SoftRAID for RAID-5 to repeat the tests under eSATA and USB 3.0 on my MacPro 5,1 with CalDigit FASTA-6GU3-Pro card. I think the results are slower due to the hardware access speeds in having to read/write to all 4 disks separately with SoftRAID as opposed to letting the internal hardware split it up over the 4 drives.

I also re-ran the speed tests with it configured for hardware-RAID5 and the results were consistent with the old tests I posted above. Keep in mind that the disks are completely empty for these speeds ... as the disks fill up it will certainly run a bit slower.


-howard


Left: eSATA SoftRAID5 ..............................Right: USB 3.0 SoftRAID5
Qx2_9TB_SoftRaid5_eSATA.png Qx2_9TB_SoftRaid5_USB3.png
 
hfg said:
Just for kicks, I hooked it up again in JBOD mode and used SoftRAID for RAID-5 to repeat the tests under eSATA and USB 3.0 on my MacPro 5,1 with CalDigit FASTA-6GU3-Pro card. I think the results are slower due to the hardware access speeds in having to read/write to all 4 disks separately with SoftRAID as opposed to letting the internal hardware split it up over the 4 drives.

I also re-ran the speed tests with it configured for hardware-RAID5 and the results were consistent with the old tests I posted above. Keep in mind that the disks are completely empty for these speeds ... as the disks fill up it will certainly run a bit slower.


-howard


Left: eSATA SoftRAID5 ..............................Right: USB 3.0 SoftRAID5
View attachment 629482 View attachment 629483
Click to expand...
Thanks again Howard,
Yeah it seems that soft raid is certainly not the way to go with this enclosure. Based on your tests I think I'm probably gonna go with hardware raid 5 as I don't see how this unit would get significantly better results with raid 10. Being as how both USB 3 and eSATA are capped at 300MB/s.
 
I get this on my home made NAS:

Screen Shot 2016-03-17 at 9.17.59 AM.png


Speeds could be better if I used faster drives... But I was cheap and went with notoriously slow drives because they were cheap and offered more storage capacity.
 
Hardware:

1. ASRock C2550D4I motherboard. I chose this for the extremely low power consumption (CPU 14W TDP) and 12 built-in SATA ports.
http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2550D4I#Specifications

2. Silverstone DS380 case with 8 hot swap bays. Chosen for the built-in hot swap bays.
http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=452&area=en

3. Silverstone ST30FX power supply.
http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=458&area=en

4. Four sticks of RAM that I had leftover from when I upgraded my Mac Pro.

5. Melanom CONNECTX-2 10GbE card for the NAS. (I bought this used from Ebay.)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/671798-001-...607686?hash=item51b840d586:g:3R0AAOSwDuJW0Pd9

6. SolarFlare SFN5122F 10GbE card for my Mac Pro. (I bought this used from Ebay.)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Solarflare-...340018?hash=item5423a615f2:g:RhwAAOSwDNdV33KG


Software:

XPEnology, which is a open source implementation of Synology. It works wonderfully and I also run Plex media server from the NAS.

On the Mac Pro, I had to install the SolarFlare drivers for the 10GbE card.


Thoughts:

I have been absolutely thrilled with this build. It has worked perfectly since I built it about 5 months ago. I spent approximately $400 to build the NAS (not including the cost of the drives, of course) and then later spent about another $90 to get 10GbE up and running.

The NAS is accessible by all the computers on my network. Those what are not on 10GbE see about 110-115MB/s transfers over 1GbE which is about the theoretical limit and speeds vary over wifi.

Setting up the software was surprisingly easy. I was up and running within half an hour after putting the hardware together.

At the moment, I have eight 8TB drives in the NAS. It's set up for SNR2 which gives me dual disk redundancy and a total of 48TB of storage.
 
pastrychef said:
Hardware:

1. ASRock C2550D4I motherboard. I chose this for the extremely low power consumption (CPU 14W TDP) and 12 built-in SATA ports.
http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2550D4I#Specifications

2. Silverstone DS380 case with 8 hot swap bays. Chosen for the built-in hot swap bays.
http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=452&area=en

3. Silverstone ST30FX power supply.
http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=458&area=en

4. Four sticks of RAM that I had leftover from when I upgraded my Mac Pro.

5. Melanom CONNECTX-2 10GbE card for the NAS. (I bought this used from Ebay.)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/671798-001-...607686?hash=item51b840d586:g:3R0AAOSwDuJW0Pd9

6. SolarFlare SFN5122F 10GbE card for my Mac Pro. (I bought this used from Ebay.)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Solarflare-...340018?hash=item5423a615f2:g:RhwAAOSwDNdV33KG


Software:

XPEnology, which is a open source implementation of Synology. It works wonderfully and I also run Plex media server from the NAS.

On the Mac Pro, I had to install the SolarFlare drivers for the 10GbE card.


Thoughts:

I have been absolutely thrilled with this build. It has worked perfectly since I built it about 5 months ago. I spent approximately $400 to build the NAS (not including the cost of the drives, of course) and then later spent about another $90 to get 10GbE up and running.

The NAS is accessible by all the computers on my network. Those what are not on 10GbE see about 110-115MB/s transfers over 1GbE which is about the theoretical limit and speeds vary over wifi.

Setting up the software was surprisingly easy. I was up and running within half an hour after putting the hardware together.

At the moment, I have eight 8TB drives in the NAS. It's set up for SNR2 which gives me dual disk redundancy and a total of 48TB of storage.
Click to expand...
That's a terrific build. Relatively cheap too. Plan on upgrading the drives to wd's or seagates?
 
No. I am happy enough with the drives I have in there right now. The performance has exceeded my expectations. At the moment, I don't need more speed. Hopefully, by the time I start running out of room, the 10TB drives will have dropped in price and I can replace the 8TB drives one at a time as storage needs require.

If you are considering something like this, I suggest that you test out the XPEnology software on a virtual machine or if you have any spare old computers laying around. Personally, I had an old Intel SS4200 NAS sitting idle to test with and I instantly fell in love with it. Even on that old thing, the transfer speeds max out the 1GbE connection.
 
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