Benchmarking the Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS

The Aiffro K100 is an All-SSD NAS with an Intel N100 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 4 M.2 2280 NVMe slots. The machine retails for £226. You buy the SSDs separately, and choose whatever operating system you want to install.

In this article I benchmark the Aiffro K100 and compare it to a variety of single board computers (both ARM and RISC-V). The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite unless stated otherwise.

Explanation of the legends used in the charts below:

RPI5 – Raspberry Pi 5 (ARM architecture)
ROCK 5T – Radxa ROCK 5T (ARM)
OPi5 Max – Orange Pi 5 Max (ARM)
OPi RV2 – Orange Pi RV2 (RISC-V architecture)
OPi R2S – Orange Pi R2S (RISC-V)
BPI-F3 – Banana Pi BPi-F3 (RISC-V )
Aiffro K100 – Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS (x86_64 architecture)
AIBOX-3588S – Firefly AIBOX-3588S (ARM)

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt

Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library.

With this benchmark, a shorter time indicates better performance.

The Aiffro K100 (like other N100 devices) doesn’t perform particularly well on this benchmark, beaten by all the ARM-based boards, but far quicker than the RISC-V machines.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2

This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression.

Again a shorter time indicates better performance. In this benchmark, the Aiffro K100 is the most performant,

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark

Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems. A clear lead for the K100.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265

This is a simple test of the x265 encoder run on the CPU with 1080p and 4K options for H.265 video encode performance with x265.

The results are nothing to write home about for any of these machines.

The less said the better!

Let’s now test RAM.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark ramspeed

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark ramspeed

In both RAM tests, the K100 puts in a fair result helped by its DDR5 RAM, but it’s someway behind some of the ARM-based machines.

It wasn’t possible to run every benchmark on each machine. For example, the RISC-V machines didn’t successfully run the RAMspeed benchmarks.

I’ve also run a few additional benchmarks on the Aiffro K100.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark openssl

OpenSSL is an open-source toolkit that implements SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols. This test profile makes use of the built-in “openssl speed” benchmarking capabilities.

I’ve restricted testing to the RSA4096 algorithm.

As shown above, the K100 scores 340.6 sign/s and 22215.5 verify/s which thrashes the ROCK 5T’s 248.5 sign/s and 16594.9 verify/s, as well as the Firefly AIBOX-3588S.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark tinymembench

This benchmark tests the system memory (RAM) performance.

A mixed result here. The K100’s 10003.2 MB/s standard memcpy isn’t far from the ROCK 5T’s 11922 MB/s. But the standard memset benchmark result is very low, averaging 9605.2 MB/s. Contrast that with the ROCK 5T’s 27646.5 MB/s.

In the next article in the series I’ll test power consumption under a variety of workloads.

Complete list of articles in this series: