X-bit labs

Network Storage System with 2 Bays: Linksys NAS200 Review (page 8)

Category: Other

by Platon Scheblykin

[ 04/13/2008 | 04:14 PM ]

Performance

The NAS200 cannot surprise you with its performance just because Fast Ethernet is too slow for a home NAS. Still, it’s our job to measure the speed characteristics of this NAS. We used the following equipment and software for our tests:

• Category 5e Ethernet cable
• Intel Centrino notebook
• Two hard disk drives (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB  SATA)
• Transcend JF130 2GB USB flash drive
• IOMeter
• FlashFXP FTP client

First we measured the data-transfer rate using IOMeter. There were three test modes: RAID1, RAID0 and Single Disk. We used two patterns, 512 bytes and 64 kilobytes. The first pattern shows the maximum amount of disk operations per second. The second pattern is indicative of the maximum data-transfer speed. The results are presented in the following table:

The data-transfer rate is very low even for the Fast Ethernet interface. It is 32Mbps on average. Such low results must be due to the NAS’ processor, which is indicated by the fact that the speed of data exchange with the SATA disks and the flash card is on the same level.

Next we benchmarked the integrated FTP server. As usual, we used three types of multimedia content: photographs (S), music (M) and video (L). To be specific, we read and wrote a 30MB folder with 130 pictures, a 130MB folder with 30 MP3 files, and one 700MB DivX movie.

As you might have expected, the results are just as depressing as those of the synthetic benchmark. The NAS200 is obviously a very slow Network Attached Storage. Firmware optimizations may bring about a certain performance growth, yet it cannot be high. The device can’t be faster than its hardware and numerous tests of R3210-based devices are indicative of this processor’s low performance.