Unfortunately, my Sabrent 2T external NVMe SSD has a cable problem and I need to return it.
The question was, where to put ~1.5T of data with reasonable access speed?
Then I hit on an idea: use two SanDisk 1T SSDs in a RAID0 configuration. RAID0 spreads data across multiple drives, speeds up access and gives you the full storage space of all the drives in the RAID. (It doesn’t provide any safety if a drive fails.)
I connected the two drives to USB-C, then used Disk Utility’s Raid Assistant to set up the RAID.
After copying my files over, I used DiskMark to do a benchmark of the RAID.
As you can see below, some operations are much faster. (Makes me wish I hadn’t misplaced the cable so I could have added my third drive.)
So if you’re thinking about external storage and need speed and/or space, consider using multiple drives in a RAID configuration.
| Drive | Seq Read | Seq Write | Random Read | Random Write |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One Extreme SSD | 356 | 475 | 33 | 62 |
| RAID0 of two Extreme SSDs | 619 | 841 | 31 | 93 |
| RAID0 again | 625 | 946 | 32 | 101 |