Has Bare Feats helped you? How about donating to Bare Feats?


BARE FEATS LAB - real world Mac speed tests

REVIEW: OWC Mercury Helios 2
PCIe Thunderbolt 2.0
Expansion Chassis

Originally posted Friday, April 11th, 2014 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

The 2013 Mac Pro has six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports (on three channels). There are many ways to use them. One way is to connect a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe expansion chassis for your PCie cards. The Mercury Helios 2 is the Thunderbolt 2.0 version of the OWC's two slot PCIe expansion chassis. Our experiment was to see how fast two striped OWC Mercury Accelsiors_E2s could transfer data when installed in the Helios 2 connected to a Thunderbolt 2.0 port on a Mac.

GRAPH LEGEND
MPt PCIe = 2010 Mac Pro 6-core, 4x PCIe slots > Accelsior_E2s
nMP TB2 = 2013 Mac Pro 8-core, Thunderbolt 2 > Helios 2 w/ Accelsior_E2s
rMBP TB2 = 2013 Retina MacBook Pro (15"), Thunderbolt 2 > Helios 2 w/ Accelsior_E2s
iMac TB1 = 2013 iMac Core i7 (27"), Thunderbolt 1 > Helios 2 w/ Accelsior_E2s

LARGE SEQUENTIAL TRANSFERS
We used AJA System Test to test file level sequential transfer speed of a 16GB test document. It also simulates capture and playback of a 4096x2160 10-bit RGB video. (
HIGHEST number means FASTEST in Megabytes per Second.)

SMALL RANDOM TRANSFERS
We used the Standard Test in QuickBench to measure the average random transfer rate for small 4K to 1024K data chunks. (
HIGHEST number means FASTEST in Megabytes per Second.)

PERFORMANCE INSIGHTS
With a Thunderbolt 2.0 Expansion Chassis like the
Mercury Helios 2 coupled with fast flash storage cards like the OWC Mercury Accelsiors_E2s, the improved real world performance of the Thunderbolt 2.0 interface can be clearly demonstrated.


(inside of Helios 2 with dual Accelsior_E2s installed)

The 2010 Mac Pro with the Accelsior_E2s installed in slots 3 and 4 show how close Thunderbolt 2.0 comes to matching the speed of those conventional 4 lane PCIe 2.0 slots.

Feedback or comments? Contact me , mad scientist.
Also, you
can follow me on
Twitter @barefeats

WHERE TO BUY THE MERCURY HELIOS 2 PCIE THUNDERBOLT EXPANSION CHASSIS
Order direct from Other World Computing.

WHERE TO BUY MERCURY ACCELSIOR_E2 flash storage PCie cards
Order direct from Other World Computing

SHOP APPLE STORE USA
Help support Bare Feats by clicking our Apple display ads or THIS Apple USA link when ordering any Apple product.

PowerMax not only sells new and used Macs, but will give you a generous trade-in offer on your old Mac.

Has Bare Feats helped you? How about helping Bare Feats?

copyright 2014 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
Email