Post your performance results

jching wrote:

Helevitia wrote: The NV is definitely the bottleneck here. But if you compare the NV to the competition, you will see that not many are faster(plus these support forums are worlds better than the competition which is why I bought an NV). In time, as NAS devices become more popular, speed will become a bigger factor, but for now it's not to most people. If you're refering to Buffalo or similar, than yes. I agree. But how about FC RAIDs, like Medea, Infortrend, Xyratec. Granted, these are fiber channel, so they get 280+MB/s with 6 disks. This is about 50MB/s per SATA drive. Which is what I would expect from a SATA RAID system. But even if we're limited to gigabit Ethernet, I'd expect greater than 30MB/s. So why is the Buffalo/NV/Thecus/etc so slow in comparison? Why aren't they getting similar performance from the SATA drives? Exactly what in the NV is the bottle neck? Is the RAID operations done in software? Is the parity done by the CPU? Aside from the fiber channel vs. gigabit ethernet, what is different between the Medea/Infortrend vs. Infrant/Buffalo? --jc

A more apples-to-apples comparison would be if you were to measure the performance of the PCI RAID cards when accessed over the network. Processing TCP packets is a huge part of the overhead as well as copying the packets in and out of network file protocol, local file system, and RAID layers. Also, make sure when you're comparing write performance to use RAID 5, as the parity generation will add another level of overhead. And make sure you measure real performance and not "cached" by using data multiple times larger than the cache.

Another big factor in this market space is power consumption. Leave your PC on with a RAID card and 4 drives and it'll eat up more than 200W of power. The ReadyNAS will use about 55W at the highest load and will settle down to 35W when disks are in sleep mode -- almost half that's used by your typical light bulb, or down to close to almost nothing when in scheduled power-down mode. Consider this a growing requirement as we all need to do our part in reducing environmental impact.