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; so we make sure that there is no bottleneck on this side, since the SSD can achieve up to 550 MB/s read and 465 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 and not only release it for free to the public, but also provide its source code. The only problem of this toolkit is that if you use a client PC with more than 2 GB of memory then 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 in our test PC via msconfig advanced options we set the max. memory to 2 GB. During all tests with this toolkit we exploit its batch run function, which repeats the selected tests for five turns and uses the average readings as final results.


The second program is a custom made program which performs ten basic file transfer tests and for each measures the average MB/s speed. To extract as accurate as possible results we run all selected tests ten times and in the end we use 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.

Finally we should add here that the DS412+ does not have an option to format external USB HDDs in NTFS, so in order to take the respective measurements we had to pre-format the external disk to a Windows PC and afterwards the NAS could "see" properly the disk.