TERRAMASTER at CES 2020: Thunderbolt DAS and Cost-Effective 10GbE NAS

[btarunr]

TERRAMASTER is democratizing 10 GbE in the consumer NAS space through aggressive cost-optimization. For small businesses, 1 GbE is no longer an acceptable network bandwidth in which multiple desktops are working on shared resources. The new F5-422 from TERRAMASTER is a 5-bay small-business NAS with a fat 10 GbE pipe, which enables data transfer-rates of up to 670 MB/s to your local network. It also features two additional 1 GbE ports with link-aggregation as a fallback. Its caddies are designed to support both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch SATA drives, without the need for adapters.

Under the hood, the F5-422 is powered by an Intel "Apollo Lake" quad-core x64 SoC (likely the Celeron J3455), running at 1.50 GHz, with 4 GB of memory that's expandable to 8 GB. The NAS supports 80 TB of total storage, or up to 16 TB per disk. It uses an aluminium alloy body with a noise-optimized single fan. TERRAMASTER's TOS 4.1 software provides a browser-based UX for the NAS. The F5-422 is priced at $600. Next up, is a new family of RAID DAS (disk-attached storage) solutions featuring Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps), targeting creative professionals working on large data-sets that need to be redundant and secured. TERRAMASTER's DAS lineup is based on a common hardware platform that features up to 1,600 MB/s of throughput, and supports up to 128 TB of aggregate storage. Models range from 2-bay, to 4-bay, 5-bay, and large 8-bay towers. These units feature aluminium-alloy bodies with grab-handles on top and 1 or 2 low-noise fans, depending on the model.



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[TheLostSwede]

So a CPU bottlenecked 10Gbps NAS, wonderful...

 

[mahirzukic2]

So a CPU bottlenecked 10Gbps NAS, wonderful...

What is bottlenecking the NIC to transfer the big rated speeds given in the specs sheet given the disks used in the bays can sustain it?
CPU? REALLY?

 

[FinlandApollo]

What is bottlenecking the NIC to transfer the big rated speeds given in the specs sheet given the disks used in the bays can sustain it?
CPU? REALLY?

You really have not played with 10GbE, haven't you? The network transfer uses CPU, and I highly doubt that in that price, the 10GbE chip is Intel's X550-series. Often these cheaper 10GbE NICs (Aquantia) offloads processes to CPU, creating a bottleneck, when CPU is too low tier and unable to keep up with the processes. With higher end 10GbE NICs, they don't offload as the chip is more capable of doing everything inside, therefore, not limited by the CPU that much.

 

[TheLostSwede]

What is bottlenecking the NIC to transfer the big rated speeds given in the specs sheet given the disks used in the bays can sustain it?
CPU? REALLY?

Yes, very much a CPU issue.
This is my DIY NAS with a 10Gbps Aquantia card in it.
I has an underclocked i7-6700K in it.

 

[mahirzukic2]

You really have not played with 10GbE, haven't you? The network transfer uses CPU, and I highly doubt that in that price, the 10GbE chip is Intel's X550-series. Often these cheaper 10GbE NICs (Aquantia) offloads processes to CPU, creating a bottleneck, when CPU is too low tier and unable to keep up with the processes. With higher end 10GbE NICs, they don't offload as the chip is more capable of doing everything inside, therefore, not limited by the CPU that much.

Seems that I haven't though. I stand corrected. Didn't know IO could be CPU bound, guess you learn something new every day.