A Few Words on Performance

There's a reason why we're comparatively late with the review of the F8 SSD Plus and it has to do with the manual file copying tests, where we saw data transfer speeds in all tests that were below that of the F4-424 with early builds of TOS 6, These weren't resolved until the version we tested with was released. The odd thing here was that the lacklustre performance didn't show up in the synthetic benchmarks, or at least not to such a degree that we noticed that something was off. Looking back at some of those numbers now, it's obvious that even some of those tests underperformed quite significantly as well. TOS 6.0.610-00165 or later is the OS version needed to get full performance out of the F8 SSD Plus and although it's not unheard of software updates bringing performance improvements, we're talking about transfer speeds of 100-200 MB/s for the game copy test below, going to 400-500 MB/s and the photo copy test not even managing 30 MB/s to the NAS, which was less than a third of the speed we saw when we tested the F4-424. It took TerraMaster a few months to get TOS 6 to a point where we got results that would do justice to the F8 SSD Plus and those are the test results that are included in this review.

Game Data

Since most people will use their NAS as a data storage and retrieval device, we've created a set of sequential file copying tests that should help demonstrate how well a NAS handles different types of data. The first dataset is a 96.2 GB game library that is copied as is from an NVMe SSD on the host computer to the NAS. This is then copied back from the NAS to the host PC. Everything is timed and converted to transfer speeds in MB/s. As TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus only supports M.2 drives, there's no SSD caching option and as such no corresponding testing. On the other hand, for comparisons-sake, we added a run with a single SSD, to see how it compared to the various RAID modes.

Single Large File

Next up we copied a single 66.9 GB large file to simulate something like a large video file or a compressed backup file being copied to and from the NAS.

Photos

The third and final test consists of 10.6 GB of photos across 4,084 files.