Thermaltake Muse R-Duo: External RAID

HD Tune and HD Tach

For HD Tune and HD Tach, we tested each of the configurations (RAID 0, RAID 1, Linear, and Big) of the Muse R-Duo independently to see what the low-level measurements would look like.

RAID 0

RAID 1

Linear

Big

The most surprising result is the crazy synthetic performance of the Muse R-Duo in "Big" mode - the controller's performance is all over the map during both the HD Tach and HD Tune tests. Certainly, this result bears watching in future benchmarks. RAID 0 mode is somewhat underwhelming, producing synthetic results similar to what we encountered in our review of the desktop version of the Seagate drive in our 1TB Shootout article. Linear mode performs roughly the same as in the 1TB Shootout article as well, though CPU usage is ~2% lower.

RAID 1 mode is disappointing. Performance drops to nearly 2/3 of what we have come to expect from the Seagate drive, which is below our expectations. In RAID 1 mode, there is usually a certain amount of performance degradation, but not typically to this degree.

These benchmarks, far from predicting real-world performance, should be taken with an especially large grain of salt when looking at RAID benchmarks. Still, the results are interesting; keep the results (particularly Big mode) in mind when we look at the remainder of our benchmarks.