Test setup

The N5200 Pro is connected directly to an ASUS Z7S motherboard using a factory made CAT6 cable, apart from jumbo frames, configuration is left at default. Storage is three 36 GB 10K Cheetahs in RAID 0 on a U320 LSI MegaRAID to prevent any local bottlenecks.

To test performance two tools are utilized: ATTO for Windows file sharing (by mounting a network drive) and the default command-line FTP client to test FTP.

Performance

As with most storage devices small transfers go terribly slow. However, performance gets quite impressive with larger sets of data. It is however weird that download is slower than upload, I expected this to be the other way around. Rerunning the test didn't change anything.


I put a nice 350 MB movie on the N5200 Pro to test FTP speeds. As you can see FTP downloads are slightly slower than the ATTO results, however still very nice.


Upload seemed rather slow via FTP at the first run. That's why I ran the test multiple times, the result did improve noticeably and I can conclude that performance is good here.

Even though performance overall is already quite good, different drives and further optimizations could probably further improve performance. However, the performance we see here is something every regular user could expect, which in my opinion is more relevant.

Performance under load

Even though a failing array can be rebuilt, you still want to access your data during the rebuilding process. Accessing the data usually isn't much of an issue, performance may suffer though. Since rebuilding an array causes quite a lot of load on the system I used this moment to see how much of a performance hit there is.


To break the array I simply pulled out a drive. The array immediately fails and the N5200 Pro starts beeping like... well, something that beeps alot and loud. Putting the drive back in does not stop the annoying beep.
Logging into the web interface shows that the array does not automatically rebuild itself. Instead, you have to add the newly added drive as a spare first. Upon doing this it figures there is a drive to use and it will rebuild the array. The beeping stops.
Now that the long process of rebuilding the array has started we run ATTO again to see how slow it gets.


To my surprise performance is still great, in fact I've seen lower speeds while the device is idle.