In part 1 of this review, we did an overview of the QNAP TVS-473 Turbo vNAS and its features. One of QNAP’s hallmarks is an excellent set of software and building easy-to-use storage appliances that even non-technical users can administer. Beyond features, we always like to look at performance. In this Part 2 of our review, we are going to look at 1GbE performance. In the third part of the review, we are going to look at adding a 10GbE network card and increasing speeds.
Let us move on to our 1GbE benchmarks, the focus of this piece We are going to use the WD Red 10TB NAS and Western Digital Red Pro 10TB NAS hard drives we previously reviewed.
To start out testing, we will begin with the Gigabit network that comes standard with the TVS-473 Turbo vNAS. We were also interested in seeing how the AMD R-Series RX-421BD quad-core processor performs. It has a very nice burst speed of 3.4GHz which should reflex nicely in our performance tests.
Intel NAS Performance Toolkit
The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (Intel NASPT) is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
In RAID 0 configuration the TVS-473 has a performance edge.
With a RAID 5 configuration we start seeing the TVS-473 take the lead in nearly all tests.
With RAID 6 we only have three NAS’s that we ran this test with, the TVS-473 shows very strong numbers here.
Like RAID 6, we have three NAS’s that can run RAID 10 configurations. Here the TVS-473 stays on top with the performance edge.
Like the last two benchmarks, we have three NAS’s that we ran JBOD tests. We see a trend with the TVS-473 performing very well.
Let us run a new set of tests to see how the TVS-473 handles encryption. The AMD R-Series RX-421BD quad-core does handle hardware AES-NI encryption acceleration, and now with four cores and high burst speed, we expect the TVS-473 to have a strong showing.
Running our encryption tests left us somewhat disappointed. We do get good results; it does seem to be dependant on what type of encrypted test we ran. In most cases, the TVS-473 was the performance winner.
Conclusion
Not surprising, the QNAP TVS-473 Turbo vNAS held strong performance numbers across all RAID types. Four drive RAID configurations, even at 10TB size are not overly difficult for modern CPUs. Gigabit networks are fairly common for SMB and home users and in the case of the TVS-473, 1GbE was simply not fast enough to handle the NAS’s throughput.
In our test lab, we also have a Western Digital Sentinel RX4100-16TB Rackmount NAS that we have been using for some time now; we decided to see what migrating our data over to the TVS-473 would be like. Using 1GbE network and copying upwards of 5TB worth of data was going to take several days, it’s painful, to say the least.
With that in Part 3 of this review, we are get the QNAP TVS-473 running with 10GbE and see how it performs. If you have not checked it out yet, see the Part 1 overview here.
