QNAP TBS-453A 4-Bay M.2 SSD NAS Review

Kingston provided four 240G SSDNow drives specifically for this review.

A dual port Intel network card was installed in the test system.

A single static volume was used in all tests.

Network Layout

To test the QNAP TS-453A and since there is a built in switch, I used the built in 4 port switch. The test PC was plugged into port 2-3 and 2-1 was connected to the router for internet access.

Software

All testing is done based off of a single client accessing the NAS.

To test NAS Performance I used The Intel NAS Performance toolkit and Crystal Disk Mark.

The Intel NAS Performance toolkit simulates various tasks for storage devices such as video streaming, copying files and folders to and from the NAS as well as creating content directly on the NAS. To limit caching, a 2GB G.Skill memory module was used in all tests. All options in the Performance toolkit were left that the defaults. The NAS performance test is free to download. You can pick up a copy for yourself here.

All tests were run a total of three times then averaged to get the final result.

RAID 0, RAID 10, and RAID 5 are all tested.

Tests were run after all the RAID arrays were fully synchronized.

For real world testing, I copied a 4.3 gigabyte ISO file from the SSD in the test PC to the shared folder on the NAS. 4.3 gigabytes of MP3 files were copied over as well.

While the TBS-453A is an all flash NAS, I needed to compare it with currently available NAS devices. I used results from our past reviews for the QNAP TS-563 and the Synology DS1515+. Both of the previous NAS reviews only used drives in the performance tests.

RAID Information

Images courtesy of Wikipedia

JOBD or Just a Bunch Of Disks is exactly what the name describes. The hard drives have no actual raid functionality and are spanned at random data is written at random.

RAID 0 is a stripe set and data is written across the disks evenly. The advantage of RAID 0 is speed and increased capacity. With RAID 0 there is no redundancy and data loss is very possible.

RAID 1 is a mirrored set and data is mirrored from one drive to another. The advantage of RAID 1 is data redundancy as each piece of data is written to both disks. The disadvantage of RAID 1 is write speed is decreased as compared to RAID 0 due to the write operation is performed on both disks. RAID 1 capacity is that of the smallest disk.

RAID 10 combines the 1st two raid levels and is a mirror of a stripe set. This allows for better speed of a RAID 0 array but the data integrity of a RAID 1 array.

RAID 5 is a stripe set with parity. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks. Data is striped across each disk, and each disk has a parity block. RAID 5 allows the loss of one drive without losing data. The advantage to RAID 5 is read speeds increase as the number of drives increase but the disadvantage is write speeds are slower as the number of drives is increased. There is overhead with RAID 5 as the parity bit needs to be calculated and with software RAID 5 there is more of a performance hit.

RAID 6 expands on RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block to the array that is distributed across all the disks. Since there are two parity blocks in the array more overhead is used with a RAID 6 array.

For a full breakdown of RAID levels, take a look at the Wikipedia article here.

RAID configurations are a highly debated topic. RAID has been around for a very long time. Hard drives have changed, but the technology behind RAID really hasn’t. So what may have been considered ideal a few years ago may not be ideal today. If you are solely relying on multiple hard drives as a safety measure to prevent data loss, you are in for a disaster. Ideally you will use a mutli-drive array for an increase in speed and lower access times and have a backup of your data elsewhere. I have seen arrays with hot spares that had multiple drives fail and the data was gone.

Do yourself a favor and read up on the different types of RAID arrays and plan accordingly. Personally, I use a RAID 10 array with an automated backup to the cloud. I feel with that setup, I’ve done what I can to keep my data safe.