Thunderbolt 3 in Action: Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro DAS Review

Direct-Attached Storage Performance

Given the presence of two bays, it is clear that the system needs to be fitted with SSDs in order to deliver maximum performance. We chose two Intel DC S3510 240GB SSDs as the members of a RAID-0 array for benchmarking purposes. Prior to taking a look at the real-life benchmarks, we first check what ATTO and CrystalDiskMark have to report.

ATTO shows performance numbers close to 800 MBps for large-sized reads, and it is backed up somewhat by CrystalDiskMark also.

In order to tackle the first real-life use-case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:

• Photos: 15.6 GB collection of 4320 photos (RAW as well as JPEGs) in 61 sub-folders
• Videos: 16.1 GB collection of 244 videos (MP4 as well as MOVs) in 6 sub-folders
• BR: 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure of the IDT Benchmark Blu-ray (the same that we use in our robocopy tests for NAS systems)

The above benchmark run was also instrumented to record the temperature of one of the SSDs as well as the instantaneous transfer rate to the DAS unit during the process. The internal disk temperature never exceeded 38 C even after more than 127 GB of writes and 127 GB of reads continuously.

For the second use-case, we take advantage of PC Mark 8's storage bench. The storage workload involves games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to cherry-pick storage traces to run on a target drive. We chose the following traces.

• Adobe Photoshop (Light)
• Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Illustrator

Usually, PC Mark 8 reports time to complete the trace, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth figures which we present in our performance graphs. Note that the bandwidth number reported in the results don't involve idle time compression. Results might appear low, but that is part of the workload characteristic. This is not the intended use-case for portable hard drives, but the results are just presented here for the sake of completeness

While the above numbers are very good, and what one expects from two SSDs in RAID-0, they do not bring out the real capabilities of Thunderbolt 3. For that purpose, we need to daisy chain multiple units.

Prior to looking at the daisy chaining results, let us see how the unit performs when fitted out with a couple of high-capacity hard disks in RAID-0. This is probably the configuration that most users would choose when looking for large amounts of fast and affordable storage. Two 8TB Seagate Enterprise NAS HDDs were installed in one of the units and all benchmarks that were run for the SSD configuration were repeated.

Note that the HDD configuration provides lower bandwidth, but much higher consistency. There is also not much benefit to higher queue depths in this configuration. The consistency aspect is also brought out in the performance consistency test.

We now move on to the results from our daisy-chaining experiments.