Test Setup

Our test system (client PC) consists of the following components:


We, as you can see, use a pretty strong test system with an ultra-fast OCZ Vertex 4 SSD off of which all tests are executed to make sure that there is no bottleneck on our side, as this specific SSD can achieve up to 560 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write speeds (sequential).

Methodology

We use three different programs to evaluate the performance of the NAS. The first is Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit. Intel was kind enough to build a NAS performance toolkit, not only releasing it for free to the public, but also providing its source code. The only problem of this toolkit is that the results of two tests ("HD Video Record" and "File Copy to NAS") are influenced heavily if a client PC with more than 2GB of memory is used, since they actually measure the client's RAM buffer speed and not the network speed. We, to circumvent this problem, set the maximum memory of our client PC to 2GB through msconfig's advanced options. All tests with this toolkit exploit the batch run function to repeat the selected tests for five turns before using the average as the final results.


The second program is a custom-made program that performs ten basic file transfer tests, measuring the average MB/s speed for each. To extract results that are as accurate as possible, we run all selected tests ten times, using the average as the final result.


The third program we use in our test sessions is ATTO, a well-known program for storage benchmarks. In order to use ATTO for benchmarking, we are forced to map a shared folder of the NAS to a local drive since ATTO cannot directly access network devices.