SSD Benchmarks

The TS-432X doesn't have any M.2 slots, unlike many modern NAS devices, but we wanted to see if the mechanical drives ended up being a bottleneck, so we installed a pair of WD Blue SATA SSDs to see if the Annapurna Labs SoC had any performance left in it. It's obviously possible to use the TS-432X with SATA SSDs, but it wouldn't be ideal from an economical standpoint.

CrystalDiskMark

The sequential read performance is near identical to the RAID-5 and RAID-0 performance with mechanical drives, but the write performance jumps up to almost the same level as the read performance. Gone is the very low random performance at low queue depths, suggesting the issue might be that the TS-432X just doesn't play well with the WD Red hard drives we use for testing.

NAS Performance Tester

Here we can clearly see that the TS-432X has a bit of extra performance left in the tank, especially when it comes to copying data from the NAS to the PC using the 10 Gbps interface.

Helios LanTest

Helios SSD 10 Gbps Helios SSD 2.5 Gbps

Here we're seeing no real gains switching to SATA SSDs over the mechanical drives in RAID-0.

Game Data

Once again, no real gains versus mechanical drives, although this depends somewhat on the RAID mode as well.

Single Large File

The 10 Gbps interface delivers a smidgen faster throughput here, when copying data from the NAS.

Photos

This is the test with the biggest gains when copying data from the NAS, but this was expected due to the nature of the files and the advantage SSDs brings over hard drives when copying small files.

Overall, nothing unexpected, but the Alpine AL524 clearly had some extra performance to offer, in the right scenarios, when switching over to SATA SSDs.