Game Data

As most people will use their NAS for storing and retrieving data, we run 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, which 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. Here, we seem to run into the first CPU limitation, as it seems like the Rockchip SoC isn't built to handle this kind of mixed data. We're looking at half the speed we know that the NASync DH2300 is capable of here when copying data to the NAS, and even switching to 2.5 Gbps, we see a similar situation—just much worse—compared to the maximum throughput we saw in the synthetic benchmarks. What this also shows is that the general purpose Arm chips might not be ideal for some use cases. Admittedly while we saw a pretty significant drop in performance from the QNAP TS-432X in this same test, it still offered over twice the performance over 2.5 Gbps. Copying the data from the NAS offered better performance, but it's still far from stellar.

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. Here, the throughput is better compared to the game copy test, even though the numbers aren't impressive using the 1 Gbps native interface. Moving to the 2.5 USB to Ethernet dongle, things improve significantly and copying data to the NAS is on par or slightly better than the QNAP TS-432X, whereas copying data from the NAS is slightly slower.

Photos

The third and final test consists of 10.6 GB of photos across 4,084 files. Once again, it seems to be the Rockchip SoC that's the culprit, as the QNAP TS-432X managed an extra 40 MB/s when copying data to the NAS over 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, and it uses an older and slower Arm Cortex-A57 based SoC. It's possible that some of this might be optimization related—and we're obviously using a different set of hard drives here—but it seems like the NASync DH2300 isn't ideal when it comes to handling smaller files. Considering Ugreen is pitching the NASync DH2300 as solution for you to keep your digital family album on, it's definitely not ideal for that first time backup of your photos, though it might not be an issue if you only add a few photos during daily use.