Noontec TerraMaster D5-300C USB-C 2+3RAID DAS Review

Test Setup and Methodology

USB 3.0 offers us up to 5Gbps bandwidth and with that a speed up to around 450MB/s on file transfers. With this performance level, we need to test with something faster than an HDD. What’s faster, an SSD, so it would be great to test the unit with them. On the other hand, a DAS is intended as a large storage pool, and for that, we need an HDD setup. So, today I’ll test this unit with both, offering us a view on the maximum performance as well as that in a common usage area.

I’ll be using my WD RED 6TB NAS hard disk drives and my Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD drives. Both are mainstream drives which will represent a good deal of the drives found in our reader’s homes. I will test single drive performance as well as RAID 0 and RAID 1 setups for each drive type.

The DAS unit connects to an Intel USB 3.0 controller on the test bench and I’ll test the various drive setups with a variety of benchmarks apps for read and write performance as well as access times.

Hardware

• Gigabyte Z79X UD5H-BK
• Intel Core i7-4790K
• G.Skill Ares DDR3 1866MHz (2x4GB)
• Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD
• CoolerMaster Silent Pro Hybrid 850W
• Noctua NH-D15S
• Dimastech Easy V3

Software

• AIDA64 Storage Benchmark
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark
• Windows 10

Test Drives

• WD RED 6TB 3.5″ NAS HDD
• Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD