Asustor AS4004T 10 Gigabit NAS Review - NAS Storage Performance Benchmarks

Performance Single (10) Gigabit Jack 

The performance measurement screenshots that we are about to show you cover like 80% of the unit capabilities and possibilities. Let's have a look at its performance. 

Above you can see the NAS at work over a 1000 Mbit/s (Gigabit) connection. Performance is fairly normal in that familiar 100 MB/sec realm. But now let's move to the next slide:

Once we move towards a 10 Gbit/s connection, the read performance from the NAS reaches a measured 1 GB/sec. Considering 10.000 Mbit/s = 1250 MB/sec I'd say we're pretty spot on. Mind you this is only possible thanks to the RAID5 configuration as a single SATA3 SSD would never be able to achieve these numbers. That said the write performance on 10 GigE is not where it should/could be. Clearly, the dual-core Marvell Armada 7020 processor cannot cope well enough with a complex RAID5 configuration. I estimate that single disk writes performance will be faster, but we'll look into that. It's very unfortunate, however, writing at over 200 MB/sec towards a NAS still is very fast of course. 

To advance on performance metrics we have created two test setups, a single SSD and three SSDs setup in RAID5. In terms of read performance, well you cannot argue that eh? At 10 GigE the RAID5 SSD performance shoots through the roof. And while a single SSD is slower, it's still mighty impressive. At the 1 Gbit/s connection, we reach roughly 112 MB/sec for both storage volume configurations. 

Writes again, here we see something very interesting. A single SSD is faster than three SSDs in RAID5. Clearly, there is too much CPU overhead as that low-power dual-core Marvell Armada 7020 processor gets overloaded on IO. This is a very interestring discovery.