It’s perfectly balanced. It can read and write at full gigabit speed, with ZFS encryption, and the CPU is ~90% utilized.
I have an ancient Atom 330 still chugging away as my Asterisk box. It's on an old Intel Mini-ITX board, the only Intel-branded motherboard I've ever had that didn't die from capacitor plague.
It's hilarious to realize that a Raspberry Pi 4 will run circles around it. The 330 can't saturate a GbE port, and even the SSD pokes along at the 1.5 Gbps SATA speed. If I didn't have a PCI telephony card I wanted to keep, I'd replace it with a Pi.
That celeron is a Goldmont+, which is a "hybrid" between previous Atom designs, with a few rehashed things from Skylake. Not a bad processors at all, though it lacks AVX (so SSE4.1 is the strongest SIMD it has) and absolutely crawls if you try to do anything number-crunchy on it.
A lot of low power cheapie cpus from the era of the N4000 have similar trade offs, if it makes you feel any better. I had a 4 core AMD Jaguar based thing from that era and it was similar, except while number crunching was decent the single channel for memory bandwidth kneecaped anything that taxed the integrated video card or cpu too much.
I will still never understand that decision for Jaguar on mobile. If it was a cost concern why not bin? Or was the worry that with 2 channels it would make Bulldozer look worse than it already did? (My personal theory, based on my experience with a 2 core 3ghz dozer part...)
Is it?
The Atom 330 was released in 2008 (as one of the cheapest, weakest processors, lowest power core Intel would produce at the time). The Rasp. Pi 4 was released 11 years later, on 24 June 2019.
I bet you that the Intel Atom 330 ran circles around any chip from 1997.
Hopefully they update their design of NAS a bit so it doesn't look as bad.
I would be interested to know how much do these new Atom cost.
But now I need to sit down and think why Intel decide to use 10nm Super fin for Atom, a low margin product at this stage of the cycle. My guess would be yield is great, but that ignores Server Part and other 10nm roadmap.
Have you ever used one? They have hardware AES, and have had since 2013.
WRITE: bw=184MiB/s (193MB/s), 184MiB/s-184MiB/s (193MB/s-193MB/s), io=10.8GiB (11.6GB), run=60067-60067msec
Correction from above though, it's an Atom C2758