An all-flash NVMe NAS is limited by one of two things: the PCIe lanes behind each M.2 slot, or the network port in front of the box. Most buyers compare slot counts and CPUs, but the lane map decides whether a single SSD can even fill a 10GbE link. This guide ranks six boxes by the throughput reviewers measured over the network and checks each result against the lane and NIC ceilings.
We checked prices, stock and maker spec sheets on October 19, 2026. The 2026 flash shortage moves SSD prices every week. We do not own any of these boxes, so every throughput and power figure below is a cited review measurement. Our own lab work is the test method in Steps 4 and 5, which we ran between two Ubuntu VMs on one Proxmox node, with the fio run over NFS.
All-flash NVMe NAS results at a glance
| Box | Best over the network (cited) | Idle power (cited) | Slots and lanes | NIC | Price on Oct 19 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASUSTOR Flashstor 6 Gen2 FS6806X | 1,110 MB/s read and write, RAID 5 | 13.1 W, six SSDs | 6: Gen4 x4 to Gen4 x1 | 1x 10GbE | about $980 |
| TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus | 1,236 / 1,230 MB/s read / write | 19.7 W, eight SSDs | 8: all Gen3 x1 | 1x 10GbE | about $765 |
| UGREEN NASync DXP480T Plus | 1.09 / 1.15 GB/s over 10GbE, 1.42 to 1.51 GB/s over Thunderbolt | about 18 W, four SSDs | 4: two Gen4 x4, two x2 | 1x 10GbE, 2x TB4 | about $900 |
| QNAP TBS-h574TX-i5U-16G | 1,050 / 868 MB/s write / read (i5 model) | 34 to 39 W (i3 model) | 5: all Gen3 x2 | 10GbE, 2.5GbE, 2x TB4 | about $1,800 |
| Beelink ME Mini N150 | 245 to 280 MB/s per 2.5GbE port | 16.9 W, six SSDs | 6: five Gen3 x1, one Gen3 x2 | 2x 2.5GbE | about $360 |
| ASUSTOR Flashstor 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X | saturates one 10GbE port | 32.2 W (maker, operating) | 12: Gen4 x4 down to Gen3 x1 | 2x 10GbE | out of stock on Amazon |
The five 10GbE boxes land between 0.87 and 1.24 GB/s, and the top of that range is the port, not the drives. The ME Mini sits far lower because each 2.5GbE port carries about a quarter of that. The real differences show up in the lane map, the idle power and how each box behaves under a third-party OS, so the sections below cover those.
How the numbers were collected
The throughput, power and noise figures come from KitGuru, Liliputing, ServeTheHome, StorageReview, TechRadar, NASCompares and The DIY Life, and each one links to the review it came from. Their test drives, RAID levels and clients differ, so read the table as a ranking of what each box achieved over its own network port, not as one controlled benchmark.
- Throughput: sequential SMB or file-copy results over the fastest Ethernet port on the box, with the RAID level the reviewer used.
- Idle power: wall-meter readings with the drive count stated; empty-chassis figures are excluded.
- Lane maps: the spec sheet from the maker first, then a lane map from a reviewer where the maker gives none.
- Prices: the Amazon US buy box on October 19, 2026, from the Amazon Creators API.
Where two sources disagree, both appear in the text. The one figure no reviewer published is NVMe temperature under sustained writes, so this guide makes no throttling claims for any box.
For third-party operating systems, the TrueNAS and Unraid comparison covers the software side; this guide only notes where a box has known driver or boot problems.
Step 1: Work out whether lanes or the network limit the box
A PCIe Gen3 lane moves about 0.985 GB/s and a Gen4 lane about 1.969 GB/s after encoding overhead, per the PCI Express throughput table. A 10GbE port carries 1.25 GB/s before TCP and SMB overhead, and reviewers measured 1.09 to 1.24 GB/s in practice. Any slot at Gen4 x1 or Gen3 x2 therefore outruns one 10GbE port with a single drive, while a Gen3 x1 slot does not.
| Box | Slowest slot | Fastest slot | Network ceiling | What limits a one-drive volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flashstor 6 Gen2 FS6806X | 1.969 GB/s (Gen4 x1) | 7.877 GB/s (Gen4 x4) | 1.25 GB/s | The 10GbE port |
| Flashstor 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X | 0.985 GB/s (Gen3 x1, two slots) | 7.877 GB/s | 2.5 GB/s across two ports | The slot, on its two Gen3 x1 slots |
| F8 SSD Plus | 0.985 GB/s (Gen3 x1) | 0.985 GB/s | 1.25 GB/s | The slot |
| DXP480T Plus | x2 (generation disputed) | 7.877 GB/s | 1.25 GB/s, more over Thunderbolt | The 10GbE port |
| TBS-h574TX | 1.969 GB/s (Gen3 x2) | 1.969 GB/s | 1.56 GB/s over Ethernet, more over Thunderbolt | The Ethernet ports |
| ME Mini | 0.985 GB/s (Gen3 x1) | 1.969 GB/s (slot 4) | 0.31 GB/s per port | The 2.5GbE port, by a factor of three |
The F8 SSD Plus shows why this matters. Liliputing measured about 891 MB/s from one drive locally, below the 10GbE port. Yet a four-drive RAID 10 pool reached 1,236 MB/s over the network. Striped pools of two or more drives clear 10GbE on reads, but writes can sag. On a four-drive F8 pool, The DIY Life saw a large copy settle a little under 650 MB/s. A two-drive mirror also writes at single-drive speed. The lane map bites hardest when a share lives on one SSD, and Gen4 x4 slots pay off for apps, VMs and Thunderbolt rather than SMB over a single 10GbE port.
Step 2: Choose the box
The picks below run from the best overall to the specialist boxes. Each one lists the measured result first, then the trade-off that should stop you buying it.
Best overall: ASUSTOR Flashstor 6 Gen2 FS6806X
The FS6806X is the cheapest box here with six or more slots where every slot outruns its 10GbE port. That makes the lane map a non-issue for any pool layout you choose.
KitGuru measured 1,110 MB/s for reads and writes in RAID 5 with six Gen4 SSDs, and 13.1 W at idle, the lowest of the 10GbE boxes here. The spec sheet lists a four-core Ryzen Embedded V3C14, 8 GB of non-ECC DDR5 expandable to 64 GB with ECC support, six slots from Gen4 x4 down to Gen4 x1, and two USB4 ports. On October 19, Amazon showed only two units left from a third-party seller at about $980. That Amazon listing title says 8GB DDR5 ECC, as does KitGuru, but the ASUSTOR datasheet lists the shipped module as non-ECC, so buy an ECC module if you want one.
Video transcoding is the first weak spot, because the V3C14 has no integrated GPU. The second is third-party software: as of December 2024 its AMD 10GbE controller needed out-of-tree patches on stock Debian kernels. In February 2026, a Level1Techs thread on an ASUSTOR Lockerstor Gen3 with the same Ryzen V3C14 still found the amd-xgbe module missing from Unraid 7.2.3, and the workaround was compiling it yourself.
Best 8-slot value: TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus
The F8 SSD Plus gives you eight slots and 10GbE for less than the six-slot Flashstor. It suits capacity-per-dollar flash built from mid-size drives in one striped pool.
Liliputing measured 1,236 MB/s read and 1,230 MB/s write over SMB on a RAID 10 pool of four 4 TB Lexar drives. With all eight slots filled it idled at 19.7 W and 33 dBA, and the i3-N305 hit 94°C under a CPU stress test. Every slot is Gen3 x1, so a one-drive share stops near 0.9 GB/s. ServeTheHome confirmed an ASMedia ASM2806 switch, and the Liliputing lane map puts four slots behind it on a two-lane uplink. ServeTheHome also logged an array build of more than 600 minutes with one core pegged.
Avoid it for TrueNAS or Linux. In October 2024 Liliputing found Debian, Ubuntu and TrueNAS SCALE failed to boot fully with the switch-attached drives installed. The TerraMaster messages conflict: NASCompares says the company officially supports TrueNAS and Unraid, while the TerraMaster FAQ says another OS voids the warranty. That warranty is two years, a year shorter than ASUSTOR’s.
Best for Thunderbolt: UGREEN NASync DXP480T Plus
The DXP480T Plus has the most Gen4 x4 slots in this guide, two, and a 10-core i5, so it suits video editors who also want Thunderbolt. In the Liliputing tests its Thunderbolt link beat its own 10GbE result by about 30 percent.
Liliputing measured 1.09 to 1.15 GB/s over 10GbE and 1.42 to 1.51 GB/s over Thunderbolt, with about 18 W idle on four Samsung drives and 40 to 42 dBA during a 100 GB write. Slots 1 and 2 run at Gen4 x4; slots 3 and 4 are x2, which Liliputing lists as Gen4 and TechRadar as Gen3. Memory goes to 64 GB, and UGREEN’s warranty page says installing a third-party OS leaves the hardware warranty unchanged.
Thunderbolt is also the disputed feature. Liliputing linked a PC to the NAS over Thunderbolt in September 2024, while TechRadar wrote in December 2024 that the port is host-only and cannot link the NAS to a PC directly. Test it on your firmware before you rely on it. Look elsewhere if you need more than four drives, or if noise under writes matters in a quiet room. The UGREEN US warranty page gives two years, while the product page shows both two- and three-year banners, so confirm the term at checkout.
Best hot-swap: QNAP TBS-h574TX-i5U-16G
The TBS-h574TX is a NASbook with five hot-swap bays that take E1.S drives or M.2 drives on the included adapters. It suits a team that moves drives between sites or wants ZFS through QuTS hero without building a server.
Every bay is Gen3 x2, about 1.97 GB/s, so each drive outruns the 10GbE port. StorageReview measured the i5-16G model at 1,050 MB/s write and 868 MB/s read over 10GbE, and up to 1,929 MB/s write over Thunderbolt from an M1 Max Mac. ServeTheHome measured the i3 model at 34 to 39 W idle and 38 to 40 dBA, the hungriest box here and the loudest at idle. The QNAP spec page lists 16 GB of memory that you cannot expand, and M.2 drives must use heatsinks no thicker than 4.5 mm.
Idle power and noise are the reasons to pass on it. Every published test also used the older i3 and i5 versions, so no review covers this i5U model yet. On October 19, Amazon sold this model directly at $1,799.
Best budget: Beelink ME Mini N150
The ME Mini is the cheapest way into all-flash storage, with six M.2 slots and a built-in power supply in a 2.5GbE cube. It suits a Plex, Immich or backup target where the network is slower than the drives anyway.
The DIY Life measured about 245 to 280 MB/s per 2.5GbE port, while NASCompares measured about 740 MB/s locally from one Gen3 x1 slot. NASCompares also measured 16.9 W idle with six SSDs and 28 to 31 W at peak. The 12 GB of LPDDR5 is soldered, Beelink caps each data slot at 4 TB, and the box ships without a NAS operating system, so you install TrueNAS, Unraid or another OS yourself.
It has no 10GbE and no ECC. On October 19 the Beelink store was pre-selling a 5GbE revision with 16 GB at $525 including a 1 TB drive. No review covers it yet, so we cannot say whether any slot lost lanes to the faster port.
Most slots: ASUSTOR Flashstor 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X
The FS6812X has twelve slots, 16 GB of ECC memory and two 10GbE ports, and NASCompares found it saturating one 10GbE connection consistently. Its lane map runs from Gen4 x4 down to two Gen3 x1 slots, so plan separate pools rather than one wide array across mixed slots. It uses the same AMD 10GbE controller as the FS6806X, so the same third-party OS caveat applies, and ASUSTOR lists its power as 33.2 W on the datasheet but 32.2 W on the spec page. Its Amazon listing was still out of stock when we checked again on October 21, so the name above links to the ASUSTOR spec page; check Amazon stock before you plan around it.
Two more are worth a look. The TerraMaster F4 SSD adds 5GbE and four slots, listed on October 19 at about $500 on Amazon, but we found no independent review. ASUSTOR also showed a Flashstor Gen3 at Computex 2026 with no price or date, so we would not wait for it.
Step 3: Pick TLC SSDs that suit the slots
A Gen4 x4 drive in a Gen3 x1 slot uses an eighth of its bandwidth, so endurance and price per terabyte matter more than peak speed. All three picks below are TLC, and we left QLC drives out of a pool that takes heavy writes. Our NVMe guide for Proxmox covers DRAM, endurance and power loss in more depth, and the drive prices in this step are Amazon US prices from October 19.
The WD_BLACK SN7100 4TB is the value pick at about $600, about $150 per terabyte, rated for 2,400 TBW with a five-year warranty. It is DRAM-less and uses host memory buffer instead, which is fine for file shares but weaker for heavy random writes.
The Samsung 990 PRO 4TB at about $800 has 4 GB of LPDDR4 cache and the same 2,400 TBW rating, and Amazon sells it directly. For more endurance, the Sandisk NAS 800 1.92TB is rated for 3,500 TBW at about $560, but its PCIe 5.0 speed is wasted in these boxes and its datasheet does not claim power-loss protection.
Filling the boxes is where the 2026 prices bite. The FS6806X with six SN7100 4TB drives comes to about $4,580 for 24 TB raw. The F8 SSD Plus with eight SN7100 2TB drives, which only a third-party seller had at about $340 each, comes to about $3,477 for 16 TB raw, before any parity.
Step 4: Test the network link with iperf3
None of these boxes reaches 10GbE speed if the client has a 1GbE port, so prove the link before you test storage. A TP-Link TX401, about $60 on October 19, adds 10GBASE-T to a desktop, and SFP+ switch owners need a 10GBASE-T SFP+ module because every box here uses RJ45. The DAC, fiber and 10GBASE-T comparison explains that trade-off, and our 10GbE NIC guide lists more client cards.
Start the server on the NAS, or in a container on it, then run the client from the Linux machine that will mount the share:
iperf3 -sOn the client, run four parallel streams for 30 seconds against the NAS address:
iperf3 -c 10.0.1.50 -P 4 -t 30Between our two lab VMs on the same Proxmox bridge, the four streams summed to 23.7 Gbit/s, which measures the virtual switch, not a physical port:
[SUM] 0.00-30.00 sec 82.7 GBytes 23.7 Gbits/sec 1 sender
[SUM] 0.00-30.01 sec 82.6 GBytes 23.7 Gbits/sec receiverA healthy 10GbE link reports about 9.4 Gbit/s in the sender and receiver summary lines. Anything near 1 Gbit/s means a 1GbE hop somewhere in the path, and that has to be fixed before any storage number means anything.
Step 5: Measure the pool with fio
Mount the NFS export on the client first. Our lab NAS VM exported /srv/nas, so the client mounted it like this:
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/nas
sudo mount -t nfs 10.0.1.50:/srv/nas /mnt/nasNext, create a job file that runs sequential and 4K random tests in turn. The file size comes from a SIZE environment variable, which fio expands in job files, because our first attempt passed –size=12G on the command line and fio still laid out the 4 GiB file set in the global section. This is the exact file we ran; set directory to wherever your share is mounted:
vim ~/nas-test.fioPaste the four test jobs:
[global]
directory=/mnt/nas
ioengine=libaio
direct=1
size=${SIZE}
runtime=60
time_based
unlink=1
group_reporting
[seq-read]
rw=read
bs=1M
iodepth=16
[seq-write]
stonewall
rw=write
bs=1M
iodepth=16
[rand-read-4k]
stonewall
rw=randread
bs=4k
iodepth=32
numjobs=4
[rand-write-4k]
stonewall
rw=randwrite
bs=4k
iodepth=32
numjobs=4Each job runs for 60 seconds, stonewall makes them run one after another, and unlink removes the test files when each job ends. fio replaces an unset SIZE with an empty string, so set it on every run. Run it from the client with a 4 GiB file first:
SIZE=4G fio ~/nas-test.fioWe ran it from the client VM against the NFS export on the second VM, whose disk lives on the single ADATA SU800 SATA SSD in pve01, behind a host ZFS cache (ARC) capped at 6.3 GiB. The four run status groups are seq-read, seq-write, rand-read-4k and rand-write-4k, in that order:
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: bw=1305MiB/s (1368MB/s), 1305MiB/s-1305MiB/s (1368MB/s-1368MB/s), io=76.5GiB (82.1GB), run=60007-60007msec
Run status group 1 (all jobs):
WRITE: bw=77.5MiB/s (81.3MB/s), 77.5MiB/s-77.5MiB/s (81.3MB/s-81.3MB/s), io=4686MiB (4914MB), run=60443-60443msec
Run status group 2 (all jobs):
READ: bw=49.4MiB/s (51.8MB/s), 49.4MiB/s-49.4MiB/s (51.8MB/s-51.8MB/s), io=2962MiB (3106MB), run=60007-60007msec
Run status group 3 (all jobs):
WRITE: bw=5433KiB/s (5564kB/s), 5433KiB/s-5433KiB/s (5564kB/s-5564kB/s), io=330MiB (347MB), run=62281-62281msecA SATA III link tops out at 600 MB/s, yet the sequential read reported 1,368 MB/s over NFS, so the 4 GiB file was served from cache, not from the SSD: the host ARC holds up to 6.3 GiB and the 4 GiB NAS VM has its own page cache. The write figures come from one consumer SATA SSD behind a sync NFS export, so they say nothing about the boxes in this guide. The same cache trap applies to a NAS with 16 GB or 64 GB of RAM: if the test file fits in memory, you are measuring RAM, not flash.
Run the read job again with a file larger than both caches combined:
SIZE=16G fio --section=seq-read ~/nas-test.fioThis time fio laid out a 16 GiB file, and the read fell below the SATA ceiling:
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: bw=251MiB/s (263MB/s), 251MiB/s-251MiB/s (263MB/s-263MB/s), io=14.7GiB (15.8GB), run=60050-60050msecThat 263 MB/s is the SSD through ZFS, so the first number was five times too high. On a real NAS, set SIZE to at least twice its RAM, for example 32G on a 16 GB box. Over 10GbE, compare the result with the ceilings in Step 1:
- About 1.1 to 1.2 GB/s: the network port is the limit, which is the normal result on a pool.
- About 0.9 GB/s on a one-drive share: a Gen3 x1 slot is the limit.
- Writes that drop sharply after several gigabytes: the SLC cache on the SSD filled, which points at the drive rather than the NAS.
- Reads above the network ceiling: a cache answered, so raise the size and run again.
Step 6: Check slot width and drive temperature
If a drive reads slower than its slot allows, check that it trained at the expected PCIe speed and width. On any Linux host or NAS shell that allows it, find the PCI address of each NVMe drive first:
lspci | grep -i "non-volatile"On pve02 that lists one drive, a Samsung 980 at 01:00.0:
01:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller 980Pass that address to lspci to read the link capability and the trained status:
sudo lspci -vv -s 01:00.0 | grep -E "LnkCap:|LnkSta:"The 980 sits in a Gen3 x4 slot, so the capability and status match:
LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 8GT/s, Width x4, ASPM L1, Exit Latency L1 <64us
LnkSta: Speed 8GT/s, Width x48 GT/s is PCIe Gen3 and 16 GT/s is Gen4. A LnkSta width lower than LnkCap means the slot is narrower than the drive, which is expected on the x1 and x2 slots that every box here has. A lower LnkSta speed means a Gen4 drive sits in a Gen3 slot. For temperature, run sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0 during a long write and watch the composite temperature line, because no reviewer published those figures for these boxes.
If the drives are fine and the pool is still slow, the RAID level and CPU are the next suspects; parity width is covered in our RAIDZ2 width tests. For more spinning capacity per dollar, the 4-bay NAS guide covers HDD boxes, and the 10GbE build under $400 sets up the network side.
