I Finally Broke Thunderbolt 5 Storage…

Añadido: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]All right, David Harry here, and in this video, I'm going to be testing RAID 0 on the Accasus TB504 with four 4 TB Samsung 9100 Pro SSDs within side of it, and I will be testing a folder size of 4 TB for the read and write tests. I will also be using my 8 TB Accasus RAID, which comprises of two TB501 Pros, and each one of those has got a 4 TB Western Digital SN850X within side of them. Now, also, what I'm going to do is have links and whatnot in the video description to everything used in the video, and if you fancy one of these enclosures, there is going to be a super duper price on it with the Kickstarter, so check all that out if you're into this type of thing. Anyway, let me get into this, and I'll come back at the end of the video and give you a little bit more information. Okay, so I'm on to me MacBook, and as we can see, I'm inside of Disk Utility, and here are the four 4 TB Samsung 9100 Pro SSDs. So, what I'm going to do is go to file, go to RAID Assistant, select striped RAID 0. Now, what I'm going to do here is to select all four of the SSDs, tap next there.

[00:01:15]I'm going to use a chunk size of 256K, and I'm also going to use APFS, and this is going to give me basically the fastest type of structure for like moving around large file types such as audio, video, picture, and stuff like that. And then, I'm just going to give this a meaningful name, so that's going to be Accasus 16 TB RAID 0. Okay, and then I'm just going to build that RAID. This should happen fairly quickly. I'll let this go through in real time just so that you can see exactly how long this takes, and it shouldn't take too much longer right now.

[00:01:56]Come on, don't make a fool of me.

[00:01:58]Oh, no, what's going on? It's taking ages. Okay, so there we go then. Going to get rid of Time Machine because I never use that. And a RAID created successfully. Get me where it's right.

[00:02:11]And as you can see here, there is the Akitio 16 TB RAID 0. So, let me just exit Disk Utility. Let me just quickly show you the properties for this RAID 0.

[00:02:22]And as you can see here, capacity 16 TB available 16 TB. Now, let me just connect the other RAID 0. Okay, so there is the other RAID 0 and this is the 8 TB one. And this one is built up of two Akitio TB501 Pro enclosures. And both of those have got 4 TB Western Digital SN850X SSDs within side of them. Now, what I'm going to do is just quickly show you the properties for this. And as you can see, capacity 8 TB available 3.99 TB. And the reason why there's only 3.99 TB available is because inside of here, I've got a folder which says 4 TB test folder. So, let me just quickly show you the properties for this test folder. And as you can see here, 4 million MB or 4 TB and that comprises of 1,930 items. Basically, loads of video files, picture files, and audio files and stuff like that. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is just to give ourselves an idea of the synthetic speeds of both of these RAIDs. And for that, I'm going to be using the AmorphousDiskMark disk speed test. So, as you can see here, the first one is being assigned to the Akitio 16 TB RAID 0. And then the second one here is assigned to the Akitio 8 TB RAID 0.

[00:03:43]So, what I'm going to do is just start the tests. Now, I'm going to run these one after the other. And the reason why is because I'm not entirely sure if the market itself could possibly become a bottleneck if I try to run both tests at the same time. But nonetheless, what I'm doing here right now is to just speed up through these until we get to the end numbers. Okay, so amorphous has done its business and as we can see here for the TB504 which has got the four 4 TB Samsung 9100 Pros in it which is the Accasus 16 TB RAID 0, we've got a read speed of 6,921 MB/s and a write speed of 6,608 MB/s and then the Accasus 8 TB RAID 0 which of course is the two TB501 Pros both with 4 TB Western Digital SN850X's within inside them. The read speed on that one is 13,511 MB/s and the write speed is 11,192 MB/s.

[00:04:49]Now as we can clearly see there the Accasus 8 TB RAID 0 is a lot faster than the Accasus 16 TB RAID 0 and the reason for that is because the 8 TB RAID 0 is using two Thunderbolt 5 buses at the same time which means that it's got twice the bandwidth that the 16 TB RAID 0 has got because the 16 TB RAID 0 is only using a single Thunderbolt 5 bus.

[00:05:15]However, what this means is that the 8 TB RAID 0 can't bottleneck the 16 TB RAID 0 in any real world disk speed tests at least as far as the write speed testing of the 16 TB RAID 0 is concerned. And with that said, let me get on to the real world a disk speed testing. Okay, so for the real world disk speed testing, what I'm going to do is to measure the write speed first of all for the TB504 16 TB terabyte and to do that I'm going to copy this 4 terabyte folder from the 8 terabyte RAID to the 16 terabyte RAID. So, let me just start this. Drop and start. Okay, so what we're going to see here then is a really high-speed sustained for a long time. However, how long is that time going to be? So, what I'm going to do here is just to speed up through this so we can get an idea of how long this maximum sustained write speed lasts for.

[00:06:15]And don't forget, if you just keep an eye on here where it says data written per seconds, that number there, that's going to give us the indication as to how long the write speed is sustained for at least the maximum write speed.

[00:06:35]Okay, so I'm going to come back in here and get ready to hit pause on the stopwatch once this data is moved over.

[00:06:42]If you give us a moment, this is nearly done.

[00:06:45]Hold on. There we go. Okay, so that's 9 minutes and 46 seconds. Let me just make a note of that. Okay, so what we've just seen there then is the maximum write speed being sustained for an entire 4 terabyte data dump or basically continuously writing of 4 terabytes to the 16 terabyte RAID 0. Now, just to be clear about what we've just seen, that RAID 0 has got four 4 terabyte Samsung 9100 Pro SSDs within side of it and once they are raided into a zero formation, not only is their overall capacity aggregated up to the 16 terabytes that the RAID is at the moment, but also the SLC cache gets aggregated as well. And with the SLC cache on each of those SSDs being over 1 terabyte, that means that we have got over 4 TB of SLC cache, which is the reason why we didn't see any drop in speed during the entirety of that 4 TB being written over. Now, something really interesting here, let me just retitle this folder here. Hold on. So, I'll call that one. Now, I'm just going to I'm not going to time this one actually. I'll just explain something here. So, let me just copy another 4 TB over. So, what we're going to see immediately is that the speed is going to be the exact same speed.

[00:08:13]However, at some point we are definitely going to exceed the SLC cache. Now, I'm not entirely sure how long that's going to take actually. Um in fact, you know what? Let me just speed up through this until the SLC cache has been exceeded, and then we will get an idea of what's going on after it starts hitting its TLC.

[00:08:39]Okay, so we've just gotten through about over 600 GB during this second data dump. And as we can see here, the speed has dropped. However, the speed is only dropped to somewhere around just over 6 GB per second or thereabouts 6 GB per second. So, what we're seeing here is the TLC performance of this 16 TB RAID.

[00:09:04]And once again, let me be clear about what we're seeing here. If any of these SSDs were inside of the TB504, were inside a single enclosure, say something like the TB501 Pros, what would happen when they hit their TLC speed, it is going to be somewhere around 1,500 MB per second or 1,600 MB per second.

[00:09:29]But once again, because we're aggregating the speeds of these things, we basically multiply that now by four in RAID 0. So, even though we are now at the TLC speed, we are still over 6,000 MB per second or around 6 GB per second for the TLC speed. And that is something that you simply will not see when using single disks or even two disks which are raided together independently on different Thunderbolt 5 buses. And we will see that in a second. Anyway, let me just clean up here for the next test.

[00:10:10]Okay, so what I've done now then is to delete and erase the data of the 8 TB RAID and give it a quick format. And what I'm now going to do is to copy the 4 TB folder from the 16 TB RAID to the 8 TB RAID. And obviously in this instance, what we're doing is to measure the read speed of the 16 TB RAID. However, at some point we are then going to hit a bottleneck with the 8 TB RAID. And when that happens, I'll explain what's going on. So, what I'm going to do is just start copying that 4 TB folder. Now, I'm not going to bother like, you know, timing this one because unfortunately, the 8 TB RAID will become a bottleneck at some point during this test. But as we can see straight away, the read speed from the 16 TB RAID 0, which once again is the TB504 with the four Samsung 4 TB 9100 Pro SSDs inside of it, that's now 6,976,980 MB per second or 6.97 6.98 GB per second. And to be honest, it's probably just a slight shade under 7 GB per second. Anyway, what I'm going to do is just to speed up through this until we start hitting the TLC limit or the SLC cache limit. And then when we flip over to TLC on the 8 TB RAID.

[00:11:37]Okay, so what we've got here now immediately is some of these like issues now where we have exceeded the SLC cache and we are now hitting TLC on the 8 TB RAID. So, as we can see, the speed is now dropped, and to be clear, that speed drop, that is not the 16 TB RAID. That is now the 8 TB RAID hitting a limit where it's lost SLC and it's now going to TLC. Now, to be honest, I thought it would have lasted longer than it did do, but it hasn't. So, in this instance, although the 8 TB RAID 0 is a lot faster than the 16 TB RAID 0, the 16 TB RAID 0 is managing to sustain write speeds like, you know, basically, like forever because it's TLC speeds are also quadrupled as well. So, like I say, what we've seen here is the effect of what happens when we aggregate SLC and TLC in something like the TB504.

[00:12:41]Anyway, what [snorts] I'm going to do now is just to do a very quick manual bit rate calculation for the write speed that we were seeing with the 16 TB RAID.

[00:12:49]Okay, so as far as the real world disk speed tests are concerned for this AK case's 16 TB RAID 0, unfortunately, as we've just seen, we can only really do the write speed because we can't even test the read speed properly from this particular RAID because the other RAID is incapable of actually keeping up with it. But, as far as the write speed is concerned, that is 6,825 MB per second continuous for 4 TB worth of data transferred. However, and as we seen, once that 16 TB RAID 0 run out of SLC cache, even its TLC speed was above 6,000 MB per second. Now, as far as its read speed is concerned, it was basically almost 7,000 MB per second or nearly 7 GB per second. And we would have seen that sustained if the target that we were writing to was able to keep up with it. But in this instance, the target, no matter how much faster it was, simply wasn't able to keep up with its write speeds from the read speeds from the 16 TB RAID 0. Anyway, I'm just going to pop off now and do an end summary. Okay, so to an end summary then, and I'm going to keep this one quite quick because I think, you know, we've just seen exactly the point of this particular RAID during those tests.

[00:14:12]And although the 8 TB RAID 0 is like almost twice as fast as this particular RAID, as we could clearly see, when it comes to things such as sustained SLC and also sustained TLC, this is way better. Now, the thing is, a lot of people out there are going to say, "Well, you know, do we really need those sustained speeds and stuff like that?"

[00:14:35]And I would say there's a fair argument to say, "Well, no, most people actually don't need that whatsoever." However, for those people out there in like certain use case scenarios, those super high sustained SLC speeds and probably more importantly, the really high sustained TLC speeds that we were seeing there, they are definitely going to give certain people a massive advantage with certain types of workflows. Now, the thing is, you know, if you know the type of person you are and what you would need, you would know why you would need those super high bit rates and stuff for sustained loads and stuff like that. But uh hopefully the video's been useful nonetheless to people, and maybe you've learned a little bit out of what you've seen here. If so, please do give the video a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel. And also, there's going to be a whole bunch of other TB504 videos, which you can find in the video description below. And I'll do a few more with them like over the next couple of weeks and stuff. And don't forget as well, if you are interested in one of these, during the uh Kickstarter period, which is on right now, that's going to be the best time to get the best prices for them. Anyway, I'm David Harry. Thank you very much for watching this video. Take care and goodbye now.