CrystalDiskMark

RAID 5

RAID 1

RAID 0

The first test we put the QNAP TS-432X through was CrystalDiskMark, as it's a quick and easy test to run and gives us a baseline for the drive performance. We ran the benchmark using all standard RAID modes. Note that we re-ran this test several times to verify the numbers, and we produced similar results each time. The sequential performance impressed us, especially as the TS-432X, in theory at least, has a much weaker CPU than the models we've tested from TerraMaster and UGreen, yet the QNAP performed as well, or better over the native 2.5 Gbps interface, with the exception of write performance in RAID-1. Unfortunately it's not all good news, as the random write performance was quite weak, except in RAID-0 mode, even if RAID-0 didn't really impress either, it was at least acceptable at lower queue depths.

Looking at the 10 Gbps numbers, we see some very respectable read performance, especially considering the Arm based SoC that's powering the TS-432X. We might not quite reach 10 Gbps speeds, but it gets quite close. The write performance is acceptable, but again we see the drop in performance once we go the random writes, and we can't quite figure out what's going on here. Let's see how the TS-432X performs in some other tests before we draw any conclusions.

iPerf3

To make sure that the networking interfaces were working as intended, we ran iPerf3. The 2.5 Gbps interface was somewhat slower when sending data to the NAS than expected, but delivered the expected speed from the NAS. The 10 Gbps interface on the other hand, was not delivering from the NAS, as it peaked somewhere around 6.5 Gbps, no matter how many streams we threw at it. Two or more streams to the NAS delivered close to 10 Gbps speeds though, but a single stream only managed close to 5 Gbps. It seems like there might be some configuration issues here, possibly due to the add-in card used, but since QNAP uses the same AQC107 Ethernet chip on its cards, it shouldn't be that causing the issue.

NAS Performance Tester

The next test is simply called the NAS performance tester, and now we're getting in to some actual drive benchmarks. We configured the NAS performance tester to use an 8 GB data set which is deleted and re-created during each iteration of the test. The test runs five iterations for the read and write operations. The reason the test data is deleted between each test run is to prevent any kind of caching from taking place. The RAID-1 performance might not look stellar, but was actually quite good compared to the Intel NAS devices we've tested, and the TS-432X actually puts in some really good performance figures in this benchmark overall.

Helios LanTest

Helios RAID 5 10 Gbps Helios RAID 5 2.5 Gbps


Helios RAID 1 10 Gbps Helios RAID 1 2.5 Gbps


Helios RAID 0 10 Gbps Helios RAID 0 2.5 Gbps

The fourth and final synthetic benchmark test is a tool called Helios LanTest which runs seven different tests to measure both response time, but also raw throughput of a NAS. We ran the test five times, which produces an average of those five runs to eliminate potential outliers. No stellar performance numbers here over 10 Gbps, but the 2.5 Gbps results are largely in line with what we've seen from the other products we've reviewed, even if the RAID-1 results might be a bit on the low side.