Currently, as a proof of concept, I have 2 LaCie 2big Thunderbolt enclosures daisy-chained to my Mac. The drives are four Hitachi 7K4000 4TB units. My zpool is a RAIDZ since I only have four drives.
The drives are AF, so I did use the -o ashift=12. For what it matters, the full command was:
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zudo zpool create -f -o ashift=12 -O casesensitivity=insensitive zp raidz /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2 /dev/disk3 /dev/disk4
By the way, any other common options I should have included?
At first, I hooked this to a Mac mini server that I have and ran this command:
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time dd if=/dev/zero of=/volumes/zp/test1 bs=1024000 count=10000
I've used on that on OpenIndiana previously to get a rough idea of what a disk subsystem is capable of.
So on the mini, I got maybe 180MB/s at first, and then for whatever reason after a reboot get as high as 235MB/s. Between reboots, displeased with the mini's first results, I tested on my retina MacBook Pro and got 252MB/s.
So, question is, is that about what should be expected?
More importantly, assuming I go to the Mac Pro, which will increase the number of drives to six, and have them directly attached to on-board SATA ports, but only support SATA 2, should I expect to see substantially better results? Not that those are so bad.