QNAP TBS-453A 4-Bay M.2 SSD NAS Review
Test Results Continued
QTS comes with a build in drive speed test and will give you the results in both sequential read and IOPS read results. After running the speed test, I noticed that drive 3 and 4 were significantly slower than drives one and two. I swapped the drives to see if it was a drive issue or a controller issue. After the drives 1 & 2 were swapped with drives 3 & 4, I re-ran the test and got the same result. I created two separate RAID 0 arrays using 1 & 2 in one array and 3 & 4 in another array and ran the Intel NAS Performance tests. The results of the tests showed that each RAID array was with in 1% of each other. While the network performance is right on par considering even the slowest on-board test result is slightly over 3x the theoretical max of gigabit Ethernet.
The QNAP TBS-453A supports hardware encoding when watching videos through the web interface or when transcoding is needed; for example watching a HD movie on a mobile device. When hardware transcoding is turned on, the movies should play smoothly and CPU utilization should remain low. For this test, I took a 4K video stream and set the interface to transcode the stream down to 1920×1080. The first image below is the movie with hardware transcoding turned off. The CPU usage never dropped below 50% and the movie was extremely choppy and practically unwatchable. Along with the playback issues, the fan inside the unit kicked up to about 50% and sounded like a small jet ready for take off. The second image shows the same movie set to transcode down to 1920×1080 with hardware transcoding turned on. Playback was buttery smooth and the CPU utilization never rose above 15%.
SSDs throttle speeds when a certain temperature is reached. However, QNAP includes small heatsinks for the SSD controllers and the fan does a pretty decent job of keeping the SSDs temperatures under control. During heavy copy operations, I saw in the control panel that the drives reached a reported temperature of 46°C. I popped the bottom off of the TBS-453A and started a 200 GB file copy operation and took the image below. While it’s hard to make out with the white lettering, drive one temperature reading during the test was 38.0°C.
