Ubiquiti UNAS Pro Speed Test: SSD vs. HDD Performance Comparison

[@pbrigham]

The most important test on this scenario, is a copy of multi small files with a total of at least 100 GB, thats what most people have, not only one big file. And here is exactly where you will see the BIG difference between SSDs and HDDs. Don't forget also the rebuilds times if a drive fails, we are talking of hours to rebuild in SSDs vs DAYS in rebuilds for HDDs.

[@jankompan]

I have been looking for this comparison for 3 weeks :), yesterday I bought 3x4TB SSDs :). Main reason is speed / noise.

[@InsideWire]

Hope you weren't disappointed with your purchase

[@practeff]

Your speeds seems way too low. I'm using 6 WD Red Pro HDDs in RAID 10 and consistently getting 450 MB/s write and 750 MB/s read. RAID 10 makes a big difference on read. I'm guessing you're in RAID 5, but I've never seen such poor write speeds. Most KZbinrs are getting at least 400 GB/s read/write in RAID 5. I don't think SSDs offer any improvement in read/write speeds because this is a SATA connection. To fully saturate a 10G connection, you would need NVMe SSDs, which are not compatible with the UNAS Pro.

[@MrTimMifsud]

I decided to go HDD mainly due to the way failure occurs. HDD gives some warning and also has a much higher capacity on cost per terabyte. Found a good deal on 4 Seagate X18 Exos 18tb drives for $1950.

[@MrTimMifsud]

Just watched after making this comment and super interesting stats. For me, after seeing this, the available boost in speed is not worth the extra money especially for my hobbyist use case plus the down sides for me are much smaller drives. Essentially for half the price, I can get four times the RAID 10 capacity with HDD and given the SATA connection, not really lose much on speeds on the write or read especially if I pick the correct HDD type.

[@InsideWire]

The stats surprised me a little too, hoping they will be use for people to make a decision on what to buy. I still would put in SSD if I could afford the 8TB ones.

[@dh-net]

Great comparison video! I wonder if adding more disks increases the performance or not

[@InsideWire]

Thank you! I will find out once I clear my existing NAS. I will add those disks to my UNAS Pro

[@JoeSee]

Thank you very much for this. Am I correct to assume with your two hardware setups of 2 SSD's and 2 HDD's would be considered "RAID 1"? I noticed Ubiquiti doesn't use those terms.. they use "Basic Protection" and "Higher Protection". The way they describe that appears to be RAID 5 and RAID 6 respectively. If this is the case, how do these speeds differ with, let's say 7 drives in a RAID 5 config vs. in a RAID 6 config compared to the RAID 1 tests you just ran, OR am I being silly and not fully understanding how RAID utilizes the drives and that the speeds of RAID 5 and 6 won't be any different than RAID 1? Hopefully I'm making sense!

[@MrTimMifsud]

Yeah seeing as even a single data centre quality SATA SSD at 4tb in Australia costs like $1000 and I can get an 18tb Seagate EXOS x18 for $500 and the way SSD fail without warning means I think I will stick with HDD for now. Also, seeing as a single 4tb SATA SSD can almost saturate the sata port, then I don’t imagine adding more SSD drives is going to add more speed as the limitation will also be the single 10gbe link.

[@Cemilaws]

iam selling my synology ds923+ tomorrow, i want to get DS1821+ with 8bays because 4 bays isnt enough and 8 bays has faster cpu, i need that 10gbe speed with multiple 20tb exos drives or redundant cache nvme like ds923, the backup speed from synology photos are always too slow like a slowest vpn conenction, that bothers me, will unifi release that kind of backup app ? if no how can i speed my backup up? i have 10g isp(8.5down/1.5up), whats the fastest nas for my application ? Thank You

[@BartLanz]

Your initial ssd vs hdd graphic is for SAS drives not SATA drives. There’s big performance difference in SAS vs SATA performance, and the UNAS pro does not support SAS

[@Dave_CDN_IrishDAB]

Using ssd in raid is a bad idea unless the NAS specificlly has a SSD raid setting. The reason for this is SSD fail over time due to a limit on how many write can be done to them. When in a raid all the drives are having the same amount of writes to them causing the endurance of each drive to drop by the same amount. (this is bad) If they all reach 0% all of the drives can fail at the sametime causing the pool to crash and you will lose all your data. This is why Synology developed F1 raid. It makes sure one drive take more of the brunt of the writes so it will fail sooner so you can replace it and rebuild you array without lossing any data.

[@craigjones9372]

No device fails absolutely predictably and SSDs don't automatically fail after a set number of writes. You've fallen for it. That said, RAID is not a good choice for SSD, but not for the reason you provided.

[@techtalkandtechunboxed]

HDD will be worth