Performance

For my performance testing I chose to install 2x750GB Seagate SATA2 16MB cache hard drives in this unit - for a situation like this more space is always better. Testing for this unit will be relatively simple; I will plug the unit into my GigaBit switch and configure it for file sharing across the network. I will copy a large file over to the unit, measure the transfer speeds via an FTP client, as well as through the Windows network file share protocol.
This unit comes with the native ability to work as an FTP server as well as Web server; these features will be tested using file transfer to an offsite location, as well as simultaneous transfers to offsite locations as well. All testing on this unit will be performed with the drives in RAID 1 (mirroring) so that my data is extra secure.



After seeing the results it still seems like these units prefer the Windows drag and drop method as opposed to the FTP client approach (for LAN that is). In the initial transfer I moved a 1.2 GB movie (.avi) to the unit which I will be testing now by streaming that piece of media to three different computers at the same time. When this file is streaming I will also transfer a new file up to the unit to record the transfer slowdown.



For further testing i preformed a basic Read/Write test on the unit, to do so I created a 100MB, as well as 1000MB dummy file and then copied the files to and from the drive (one at a time.) While i was doing the copying i recorded the times with a stop watch and rounded the numbers to the nearest second. Please note that since these times where hand recorded there will be a bit of variance in them, this is intended to give you a rough estimation of the read/write times.



The streaming files played uninterrupted until the end of the file transfer. When the unit resynced, or refreshed its files there was a brief video lag (about 2-4 seconds) on all the machines that were streaming the movie. This transfer slowdown was to be expected and is acceptable considering the load the unit was under.

For my last phase of testing I will be setting up a simple test website, along with the FTP server aspect of this unit. Setup of both was a breeze as I covered in the Web Interface section. Once it was all setup I logged into the FTP aspect of the server (connecting to my IP and logging in with the information that I had setup) from a friends house. Transferring the files over was nice and speedy as well they came across at my full home upload speed (120 KB/s). I was happily copying and transferring files via the FTP interface. The website worked exactly as advertised as well, I simply copied the files I wanted to be displayed into the "web" folder on the unit and viola I was away and hosting my own website!