An in-depth (16 page) review and comparison of soem of the latest Network Attached Storage devices.
“Network attached storage (NAS) is a hot market these days, not only for the SMB (Small to Medium Business) market, but also for the home user. As more and more computers appear in our homes, the need for shared storage is becoming a lot more prevalent than in the past. Also, with drive sizes approaching a terabyte, backing up and storing important files requires more than the typical single drive enclosures. The million dollar question, however, is which device do you buy?
With Gigabit networking and multiple drives on all these devices we went into this article with the hope of high throughput. Unfortunately this was short lived once we dived into the benchmarks. Most of these devices are running tiny processors and software-based RAID. The result is transfer rates that average 10MByte/second, which is quite slow if you’re used to copying data off of a hardware based RAID array. However, the purpose of these devices isn’t necessarily to be able to read and write at theoretical gigabit line-speeds. These devices are designed to provide long term shared storage, backup a few machines on a network, or stream a few DVDs to a media device.
The most difficult part of this article was developing the benchmarks. There are a number of different utilities out there to perform I/O benchmarking, and some are better than others. We tried IOMeter, IOZone, and we developed a couple of our own. The problem we kept running into was that most of the benchmarks were not producing numbers similar to a windows file copy, which is exactly what most users will be doing. In the end, we selected IOMeter and we developed a very simple command-line benchmark that will time a file copy. Descriptions and links to these benchmarks are on the test configuration page.”
Read the full article: NAS Roundup