Nice. What type of SSD did you use?
This was my first time seeing a M.2 stick in person, I was surprised at how tiny they are!
-Ted
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Yes, the M.2 drives are a much smaller form factor, as their main use is on the main boards underneath the PCIe slots. Theyāre amazing hardware. Also can get very hot at full speed.
The one unfortunate aspect of the setup you have, is that the SSDs themselves have a read/write speed of 7GB/s, but youāre only getting 1.5GB/s of that on your Mac with all the bottlenecks of OWC and TB interfaces.
You need to connect direct to the PCIe lanes on the mainboard to harness that speed. Which you can on Linux. Or if the system has PCIe slots (Intel based MacPro). The new M2 MacPro has a few slots that can be used for storage, but the lanes I believe are still a piece of patchwork. Havenāt looked if you can get the full speed on the new MacPro. That would be the only reason to use it over the MacStudio.
Just going to throw in: if youāre RAID0 I would just use Apple Raid Utility.
I tried a RAID5 with Softraid, and after the computer locked up and I had to do a hard reset, it lost the entire drive. Had to reformat. My conversation with OWC support basically confirmed a hard reset might corrupt the file database, itās an Apple vs Softraid disagreement. No solution other than reformat. So Raid0 and have a solid backup plan.
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Thatās actually way less than what Iād expect you to be getting @KuleshovEffectā¦ Iām running a Express4m2 and Iām considerably faster than your data rates with the same TB connectionā¦
Just flagging because you should be able to saturate that single link no problem with 4nvme sticks.
@aaronneitz Yes, itās a RAID 0 with Apple Raid Utility.
@cnoellert Thanks for sharing! Iām never going to need the speed I have, but Iām certainly annoyed that I should be getting more. Iāll look into it - are you using Softraid or Apple RAID utility?
-Ted
This is with an Apple Raid 0 via disk util.
Good luck man
uninstall softraid,
Its widely accepted to be utter junkware.
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My limited research indicates that Softraid is good for fancier raid setups like 10 and 5.
Thereās a nexus between cost and safety that only matters to the home user since any shop will have a more complex server solution. Which is a long-winded way of saying I like SoftRaid cos it does RAID 10.
Disk Utility can do RAID 10 (mirror, mirror, stripe). For anything more fancy, like RAID 5, Iām not aware of any other utility for the Mac other than SoftRAID that will do it. I wish macOS had built-in RAID 5 support.
And now is when I remember Appleās almost adoption of ZFS back in the Leopard days and think about what could have been. 
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RAID 0, 1, and 10 are simple channel ops and super light weight. RAID 5/6 which require parity computations have a lot more overhead. Same for the rebuild. Trading off simplicity for cost (RAID5/6 are the ones that can provide redundancy on fewer drives).
While software RAID solutions are handy, especially in the Mac ecosystem where you canāt add cards anymore and everything has to funnel through TB. In the end a good hardware RAID controller is hard to beat. When I had to move my external RAID from PC1 to PC2, I just took the Highpoint card out of PC1 and stuck it in PC2, despite fresh OS and everything, and it just worked. Never had corruptions even on power cycles, etc.
Try changing your tb cable. It could be the problem here.
Interesting.
When I first read your comment, I was mostly thinking of the USB-C vs. TB3 cables, which have the same connector but arenāt TB3 compliant. And thought for sure by now everyone understands that and uses a properly marked TB3 cable.
Yet, last night I received 3 client drives I needed to load-up on to our systems. And despite them being SSD, the transfer ran at an excruciating 35MB/s and ended up taking all night for the first drive. I even tried different destinations, no dice. This morning I ran a speed test on the client drive and it came back with said 35MB/s, so not my system, but the drive. However, itās a Samsung SSD and theyāre faster. The cable I was suing was properly marked with TB3, a bit on the longer side, and Iām pretty sure Iāve used it many times before. But to be certain I swaped it for another TB3 cable, and now the speed test came in closer to expectations at 750MB/s.
So not only are not all cables with USB-C connectors the same (there are by design charging only cables, usb only cables, and then TB3/4 cables), but apparently not all TB3 cables are created equal either just to add to the pain point (or that cable has become defective, or was wrongly marked).
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raid 0 all slots
granted this is what I just got on my internal Mac Studio drive
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Iād never understood why some cables would be better than others until I saw this:
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Fascinating, good find and good explanation. I didnāt realize the had circuitry in those cables.
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Oooh cablesā¦ Hacker cablesā¦
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Interesting new entrant: OWC Unveils Its Fastest Portable Drive Yet, the Express 1M2 with USB4
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its just a single m.2 though but it does looks cool would make a great shuttle drive.