DAS Configuration

Test Setup for Single-Client Tests

The test system (client PC) for single-client tests consists of the following components:

Methodology

We ran some of the NAS benchmarks on this DAS, as the main usage is similar enough. The synthetic benchmarks consisted of CrystalDiskMark and Helios LanTest, which can also be used with local drives. We also ran the same file copy tests as we did on the recent NAS review.


CrystalDiskMark, for those that aren't familiar with the benchmark, is a popular Japanese drive benchmark that tests sequential and random read and write performance of a drive.


The Helios LanTest is a NAS benchmarking tool that performs multiple tests. It has five response time tests of increasing difficulty as well as two sequential performance tests. It also has a default setting for 10 Gbps Ethernet, which should be ideal for a 10 Gbps USB interface as well in this specific use case. In case of the responsiveness/latency tests, a lower number is always better, and obviously it's the opposite for the sequential read and write tests.

This was followed by three data copying tests. The first of these three tests is a game library that consists of 10,458 files for a total of 96.2 GB worth of data. The second test is a single 66.9 GB file and the third test consists of 4,084 photos which in total add up to 10.6 GB worth of data. These files are copied from an SSD to the DAS and then from the DAS back to the SSD. This gives us a result in minutes and seconds that is then converted to an average MB/s transfer rate. Note that the actual transfer rate can vary a lot during these tests, especially in the first test, due to both very large and very small files being copied.

We performed the tests both on a pair of mechanical drives using the two RAID modes, a single mechanical drive, and a single SSD.