Performance and RAID modes
All tests were performed in a full 10GbE environment on the already mentioned Netgear XS505M switch and desktop computers with Aquantia 10GbE LAN NIC.
As you can see below, TerraMaster could reach a maximum bandwidth of 651MB/s using two Seagate IronWolf 6TB HDD. TerraMaster recommends these HDDs on their website, but any other NAS series drives should be perfect.
High Performance Hardware Configuration
The TerraMaster F2-422 utilises an Intel® Celeron® quad-core 1.5 GHz processor equipped with a 10 Gb Ethernet port and two 1,000 Mbps Ethernet ports to support network aggregation. AES NI hardware encryption and 4K transcoding allow the setup to achieve a read-write speeds as high as 651 MB/s ( Seagate IronWolf 6TB x 2, RAID 0). This makes it highly suitable for professional users in the field of video editing or those with large volumes of data and significant speed requirements.
Ten times standard bandwidth
The 10GBASE-T RJ45 port offers 10 times the bandwidth of a standard 1GbE port without the need for network cable replacement, significantly improving overall network performance and efficiency.
The 10GbE connection in our tests provides over five times higher bandwidth than the 1GbE. It’s maybe not ten times more, but it’s still a significantly better result. For comparison, the 2.5GbE LAN gave us a maximum bandwidth of about 250MB/s while 10GbE reached about 600MB/s.
Below is one more photo of mentioned ports available on the F2-422 NAS, while above, you can see the view in the control panel and confirmed 10GbE connection on the LAN 3 port.
Supports Multiple Raid Modes
Multiple raid modes are supported, including RAID 0, RAID1, JBOD, and SINGLE, meeting the needs of a variety of applications and users and offering increased data security. Raid online expansion and migration are also supported, allowing easy expansion of storage space without data loss.
To configure RAID modes, we have to enter the storage manager. We can pick RAID 0 or 1 but also JBOD modes for our two drives. Drives can also be initiated without any mode but as you can find out later, recommended, in any case, is RAID 1, also called mirroring.
Expandable Storage Space
TNAS offers high expandability: mounting iSCSI LUN, NFS remote folder, and SMB remote folder allows simple expansion of the storage space, whether in the file server, VMware VM, Hyper-V VM, or existing TNAS device.
Those who wish to see the network drive as a local one can configure the iSCSI service or NFS/SMB remote folders. The performance in the iSCSI service is about the same as on a typically mapped drive. This service is related more to business solutions.
Performance in RAID 0/1
Below you can see some of our results in popular storage benchmarks.
In all cases, the left result always shows RAID 1 performance while the right one, RAID 0 performance.
Let’s begin with CrystalDiskMark in the older version, which gives us a chance to test mapped network drives.
The maximum bandwidth highly depends on used test files and how the benchmark uses them, so don’t expect the maximum declared bandwidth in every test. As a baseline, we can pick a 1GbE bandwidth, which is about 120MB/s on faster series NAS.
Our NAS configuration could reach up to 361MB/s read bandwidth in RAID 1 and 372MB/s in RAID 0. At the same time, RAID 0 could go up to 20MB/s higher write bandwidth. Both RAID modes provide not far results from each other, and both are pretty good for a NAS.
The LAN Speed Test could reach 534MB/s read and 138MB/s write in RAID1 mode, 520MB/s read, and 197MB/s write in RAID0. Read bandwidth looks significantly better in this benchmark, while the write bandwidth is worse than in the CrystalDiskMark.
AJA benchmark shows bandwidth during video operations, and it already shows some excellent numbers in read and write bandwidth. Again, RAID 0 isn’t much faster than RAID 1, so it’s hard to recommend it as if we keep more valuable data, then any drive failure will cause data loss.
The last benchmark shows the highest maximum bandwidth of 586MB/s. These are already excellent results for any NAS. We couldn’t reach the bandwidth which TerraMaster could achieve on their setup, but it’s not really much worse. It’s possible that the limiting factor can be the switch or something else in the network. We didn’t test the direct connection between NAS and the PC, which could speed up the connection a bit. On the other hand, it’s a rarely used configuration, so we didn’t want to spend time on it.
I wondered if 4GB RAM is enough for the NAS to handle all our tests, but I haven’t seen it passing 3GB in tests, so I can say it’s just the right capacity.
Supports Multiple File Services
The device supports SMB/CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP/SFTP, WebDAV files services, SMB, NFS, and iSCSI remote mounts, as well as offering Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS cross-platform access.
Advanced File Systems
Both EXT 4 and Btrfs file systems are supported, with the Btrfs file system introducing advanced storage and Snapshot technology to prevent data damage and reduce maintenance costs. As well as improving data integrity, this also provides flexible and efficient data protection and recovery tools.
The F2-422 NAS supports various file services in every popular environment with all popular network devices, regardless of whether we are PC, Mac, or Linux users.
