Disk
The machine came with a 1TB Kingston NVMe drive. That’s an PCIe Gen 4 NVMe with a maximum read speed of 6,100 MB/s and a maximum write speed of 5,300 MB/s. It’s a fast QLC drive from a very reliable brand.
It’s the same disk that came with Minisforum’s UM890 Pro and AI X1 Pro Mini PCs.
I’ve evaluated many ARM based machines with NVMes previously and machines rarely attain anywhere near what the NVMe achieves in a mini PC / desktop PC. It’s so refreshing with the MS-R1 that the machine has decent disk performance which gets close to the rated maximum.
Networking
One of the highlights of the MS-R1 is that it has dual 10 Gbps ethernet ports which can auto-negotiate at 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps, or 10 Gbps.
I had to borrow some equipmemt to test the ethernet ports as my home network runs at 2.5 Gbps. I obtained 9.43 Gbps transfers with the borrowed kit.
For Wi-Fi testing, I placed the MS-R1 on a different floor from the router, with several thick walls in between and no option for Ethernet. Even in those conditions, performance was solid and comparable to the Minisforum mini PCs I’ve tested.
In the next article in the series I’ll run some power consumption tests.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Processor Benchmarks against other ARM and RISC-V machines
Page 2 – Processor Benchmarks against Intel machines
Page 3 – Memory and Graphics
Page 4 – Disk and Networking
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Minisforum MS-R1 ARM Mini Workstation | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the Mini Workstation |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Minisforum MS-R1 ARM Mini Workstation |