Random R/W performance with TB diskarray

[seiyafan]

I saw the article today titled "How Fast Is Thunderbolt, Really? Tom's Tests With 240 TB". It seems the array can provide faster sequential read and write performance than SSD. What about random read and write performance? I am working in a network setting that requires fairly fast random read speed, we currently have a 8-HDD array (Firewire 800) for storage, SSD was considered but later ruled out because of reliability issue. Array multiple SSDs was not an option either due to cost. Do you think that by upgrading the current Firewire disk array to a Thunderbolt disk array like the Lacie would improve random read performance if all disks used are HDD?

 

[popatim]

It doesnt sound like you've priced out Thunderbolt yet if you think SSD's are expensive...

And to answer your question, Maybe.
You haven't told us what drives and what configuration you currently have but FW800 caps out at about 400MB/s and with 8 fast modern HDD's in raid 5 you would easily be bandwidth limited since you could potentially hit 600MB/s. 8drives in raid0 ~800MB/s. Raid10~400MB/s

 

[popatim]

edit - the speeds I posted are for 1394B &c. If you are using the original FW800 you would be cap'd at about 100MB/s.