How we tested
We assessed each NAS device for ease of set-up, paying particular attention to the following:
- Discovery, connect to the Device and login
- Disk array configuration, RAID 5 data volume setup and shares
- Creation of user accounts
- General administration
The Test Environment
A small network was set up in the lab comprising the following:
- NAS being tested
- 3Com SuperStack3 10/100/1000 switch
- 1.4GHz Pentium 4 configured with:
- Intel Pro/1000 XT adaptor
- RedHat 7.2
- 1.8GHz Pentium 4 configured with:
- 100TX adaptor
- Windows 2000 Professional SP2
The Linux box was used to assault the NAS under test using Postmark which is described below. The gigabit Ethernet NIC was included to ensure the maximum bandwidth when firing multiple files at the NAS.
The Windows box was used to simulate a typical user on a 100TX LAN saving and retrieving files of various sizes to and from the NAS.
Windows File Copy Tests
A series of files were copied to and from each NAS from our Windows 2000 client to look at common file transfer speeds using a variety of file sizes as shown below:
- A folder and six subfolders containing 1140 small to medium files for a total of 76.6MB
- One medium-sized file of 26.4MB
- One large-sized file of 402MB
Postmark Benchmark
Postmark is designed to create a large pool of continually changing files and to measure the transaction rates for a workload approximating a large Internet electronic mail server.
PostMark generates an initial pool of random text files, then a specified number of transactions occurs.
The incidence of each transaction type and its affected files are chosen randomly to minimise the influence of file system caching, file read ahead, and disk level caching and track buffering. Postmark was run from a Red Hat Linux 7.2 client using Samba (SMB) with 1000 initial files sized between 500 bytes and 500KB with a total of 10,000 transactions. Read and write throughput scores were recorded.
Benchmark results
8%
1%
