NAS Storage Performance Benchmarks

Performance at one Gigabit Ethernet

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. For this NAS we'll test both with a single SSD as well as 3x HDD setup in RAID5. Sequential perf is the leading metric here, 4K Que depth 1 and 1 thread is your worst-case scenario with thousands of small files and no queue to deal with them. 

The NAS is at work over a 1000 Mbit/s (Gigabit) connection. Performance is very good in the sub 120 MB/sec realm. Here's where we are a bit spoiled and need to make a remark. We feel NAS servers in this price category (and especially with NVME on-board) already should be compatible with being 10 Gbps. In my office, we've already migrated towards a 10 Gbit/s infrastructure, and going back towards 1 Gbit/s for this unit feels a little shy. The NAS also does not include PCIe expansion slot for adding your own 10Gbps-capable, so that is not an option either. Link aggregation would get this unit towards 2 Gbps, unfortunately, it requires a lot of hardware and OS support, so it is not really a viable option in the year 2019 anymore ergo we halted testing that.  

To advance on performance metrics we have created two test setups, a single SSD and three HDDs setup in RAID5. In terms of read performance, well you cannot argue that. At the 1 Gbit/s connection, we reach roughly 117~118 MB/sec for both storage volume configurations. Which is what you may expect from a proper NAS in this year and age.

Writes again, here we see something very interesting. A single SSD is a tiny bit faster than three HDDs in RAID5. The results are excellent for 1 Gbps GigE, of course.