Conclusion

This time we got a much better impression from the network storage solution performance, because we were witnessing a race between Maxtor Shared Storage Drive and our WD NetCenter. At first let me make a few general conclusions.

10/100 Base-T Ethernet interface slows down the progress here. Contemporary hard disk drives with high spindle rotation speed appear simply unable to take full advantage of their potential because their performance gets limited by the real interface bandwidth, which is far from what we would want it to be, unfortunately. Of course, it would be much more adequate if WD NetCenter supported Gigabit Ethernet interface, which would be more appropriate for a large capacity hard disk drive used in it. I once again caught myself thinking that we are victims of some marketing games here. The manufacturers are trying to win as much as possible, as the next thing they might announce would be an absolutely the same solution but supporting faster network interface. And as a result costing considerably more. True: minimum investment, maximum benefit. These are just my two cents.

And now back to our testing participants. Of course, as you have just seen from our testing results, WD NetCenter looks much better than Maxtor Shared Storage Drive. When processing large files, both storage solutions show about the same results. However, as it comes to smaller files, the WD drive wins the race immediately. In other words, it will work faster in real life. I assume that WD NetCenter owes this victory to better firmware, which leads to much more optimal buffer performance. So irrespective of the storage capacity, the performance laurels belong to WD NetCenter.