Performance Summary - Internal & External Storage

The following graph shows the overall performance of the NAS on all tests we conducted using our custom-made software.



All cases suffer from data transfer speeds that are way lower than the ones Shuttle advertises. We expected lower number in a RAID 1 configuration, but not in RAID 0. Also, the USB 3.0 port of the KD20 seemed to be incompatible with all USB 3.0 storage devices we tried (three, including a USB 3.0 flash disk), and its performance was sluggishly low. Even the USB 2.0 ports, which usually don't have compatibility problems, couldn't register acceptable performance. Finally, the KD20 doesn't support external EXT3/4 file system drives, so we only conducted NTFS external storage tests.

Overall, the KD20 is anything else but a speed demon, and you should, if you are brooding over buying the unit, know that transfers to/from the NAS require a lot of patience, especially if you have to move large volumes of data around frequently.

Performance Comparison Graphs

Let's now check the performance of the KD20 against other NAS devices. We currently only have measurements of few NAS devices, but the following graphs will become a lot more comprehensive after a couple more reviews.