CrystalDiskMark

TRAID

RAID 5

RAID 1

RAID 0

Single SSD

First up as always is 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 available RAID modes, plus with just a single SSD, and we topped out somewhere around the 1180 MB/s mark when it came to reading data from the F4-424 Max, which was doable with either mechanical hard drives or the SSD. On the other hand, if you want to max out the write performance, you really want to stick an SSD or two in there, as the hard drives came up short when copying data to the NAS, this was by no means surprising, as this is the nature of hard drives. What did surprise us was that the SSD test didn't do better when it comes to random performance, and it was in fact somehow outperformed by the hard drives in RAID 5. The SSD performance was at least on par with the F8 SSD Plus, and it would be surprising if it was slower, since the F4-424 Max technically has more bandwidth available per slot, but the 10 Gbps network connection ends up being the bottleneck here. At least a single stream was enough to max out the 10 Gbps Ethernet interface, running multiple streams didn't improve performance in either direction.

iPerf3

To make sure that the networking interface is working as intended, we run a quick test with iPerf3. No matter what we did, we weren't able to squeeze the full 10 Gbps speed out of the F4-424 Max when transmitting data from the NAS and multiple streams made no difference either.

NAS Performance Tester

The next test is simply called the NAS performance tester, and this is when we get in to some actual drive benchmarks. We configured the NAS performance tester to use an 8 GB dataset 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. Here the F4-424 Max trails the F8 SSD Plus until we look at the SSD results, which are showing very similar numbers. On the other hand, the write performance is better than the Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus when we look at the mechanical drives, but the read performance lags behind by around 15-30 MB/s. However, the SSD performance is in favor of the TerraMaster.

Helios LanTest

Helios TRAID 10 Gbps


Helios RAID 5 10 Gbps


Helios RAID 1 10 Gbps


Helios RAID 0 10 Gbps


Helios single SSD 10 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 fives times which produces an average of those five runs to eliminate potential outliers. The read and write test varies a lot less here and there's less variation between the different test scenarios as well, even though the throughput figures are lower than in the NAS Performance Tester and CrystalDiskMark. Here it seems like the more powerful processor and wider PCIe bus in the F4-424 Max means that it can outperform the F8 SSD Plus in the SSD test, and it's not by slim margin in the read test either. It also outperforms the Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus in all the write tests, but not all the read tests.