Test Setup

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

As you can see, we use a pretty strong test system with an ultra-fast OCZ Vertex 4 SSD from which all tests are executed. This is to make sure that there is no bottleneck on this side as the specific SSD can achieve up to 560 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write speed (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 did Intel release it for free to the public, but they also provided its source code. The only problem of this toolkit is that if you use a client PC with more than 2 GB of memory, the results of two tests ("HD Video Record" and "File Copy to NAS") are heavily affected since they actually measure the client's RAM buffer speed and not the network speed, so we set the maximum memory of our test PC to 2 GB via msconfig's advanced options. We exploit its batch run function during all tests with this toolkit, which repeats the selected tests for five turns before using the average reading as the final result.


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 before taking 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.