CrystalDiskMark

The first benchmark we ran on the D8 Hybrid was CrystalDiskMark, as it's a quick and easy test to run and gives us a baseline for the drive performance. We tested four different configurations, single hard drive, RAID 1, RAID 0 and with an SSD. The RAID 1 numbers were a little bit slower than the single drive numbers, most likely due to the MCU in the ASM1352R having to duplicate the data on the second drive in the RAID array and not quite having enough performance to do so at full speed.

The RAID 0 numbers more or less doubled the sequential read and write performance compared to the single drive tests, but the benefit of RAID 0 in the random tests was either absent or offered little extra performance, especially on the read side. Plopping in an SSD in the D8 Hybrid shows that the DAS is capable of hitting 10 Gbps speeds, minus overheads and the write performance is similar to other 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 connected storage devices. However, the write performance is lacking somewhat, and we tested with different drives to see if it was the drive in question that ended up thermal throttling, but the rest were similar enough that this was unlikely to be the case. As such, this appears to be either a hardware or a firmware limitation of the D8 Hybrid.

Helios LanTest

Single drive

RAID 1

RAID 0

SSD

Although the Helios LanTest is intended for testing NAS appliances, it can also be used for testing local drives and as the TerraMaster D8 Hybrid can be used to expand a NAS, we figured we'd use it here to see what kind of performance we can expect. Again we're seeing a slight dip in performance going from a single drive to RAID 1, suggesting that there is some kind of processing overhead here. It's still a small price to pay for an automatic duplicate of your data when you're doing a backup. The RAID 0 benchmarks aren't showing as big of a performance increase as CrystalDiskMark, but we're still close to doubling the throughput. Moving to the SSD tests we're again seeing great write performance, but the read performance is falling behind even further here when compared to CrystalDiskMark.