CrystalDiskMark

TRAID

RAID 5

RAID 1

RAID 0

Single SSD

CrystalDiskMark is a quick and easy test to run and it gives us a baseline for the drive performance. We run the benchmark using all available RAID modes—with and without SSD caching—plus with just a single SSD. What surprised us was that the write performance in TRAID, RAID 5 and RAID 1 was better than that of the F4-424 Max. However, as we're only using 1 GB of test data, this is likely to be cached, but even so, it appears that TerraMaster has managed to improve write caching in TOS 6. Overall, the performance was very consistent here, with no issues to report, except there being a strange hiccup in the RND4K Q32T16 write test with the SSD. We re-ran this test three times and ended up with similar numbers each time.

iPerf3

To make sure that the networking interface is working as intended, we run a quick test with iPerf3. There was a tiny performance improvement running multiple threads here, but it's so small that it would be insignificant in real world usage scenarios.

NAS Performance Tester

Our next test is simply called the NAS performance tester, and this is where 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. We weren't quite prepared for the performance here, as the F4-425 Plus beats the F4-424 Max in every single test—except the one using an SSD—when it comes to copying data from the NAS to the host PC. TerraMaster has clearly worked out some kinks in TOS 6, which is great to see.

Helios LanTest

Helios TRAID 5 Gbps


Helios RAID 5 5 Gbps without and with SSD caching


Helios RAID 1 5 Gbps without and with SSD caching


Helios RAID 0 5 Gbps without and with SSD caching


Helios single SSD 5 Gbps without and with SSD caching

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. Things aren't as impressive here, even though the performance isn't bad, it seems like the F4-425 Plus has slightly worse latency than both the F4-424 and the F4-424 Max in the first three tests. We're talking milliseconds here, but it seems like an odd issue and it remains when using SSDs.