ThunderBolt performance

Measuring ThunderBolt performance

With our RAID unit now active we can do a test or two. One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. I love it to death as it is so reliable and produces such accurate results. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

The red line is the ASUS motherboard with Laci LBD setup in raid. For comparison reasons we threw in a WD Velociraptor and the Intel 320 SSD (300 GB version BTW which is faster then the smaller versions). As you can see the results do not disappoint.

Write performance is a little more tricky, we do not pass 240 MB/sec, but that is to be expected with the 320 series SSDs. So that's not a ThunderBolt limitation.

PCMark vantage has a very good test suite to benchmark storage performance. The software will look at tasks you normally perform with your PC and will try to measure what kind of an effect that has on your user experience by testing eight different segments, stressing the storage unit.

As you can see we have very varying results here.

The RAID-0 setup has a very hard time really. Not at all related towards ThunderBolt actually.

But as a result the LaCie LBD with two SATA2 Intel 320 SSDs in RAID-0 perform so much worse opposed to today's SATA2 and 3 SSDs (single units).

A quick check with CrystalDisk Mark reveals decent performance.

And AS SSD Benchmark gives an extensive result set showing pretty interesting numbers.