9. NAS Performance, Continued

Finally, Figures 19 and 20 will help put the WL-HDD's performance in perspective. They show a comparison of Write and Read performance for varying record sizes for 128 MByte file transfers for three devices:

The WL-HDD A Linksys NSLU2 with Maxtor USB 2.0 drive A 20 GB Hitachi DK23DA-20F 4200RPM drive on a 1 GHz Celeron notebook with 576 MB RAM, WinXP Home SP2 system running iozone

Figure 19: Write performance comparison
(click on the image for a larger view)

Figure 19 shows that the WL-HDD's write performance lags far behind both comparison systems by a significant margin.

Figure 20: Read performance comparison
(click on the image for a larger view)

Read performance (Figure 20) was so dominated by the notebook that I had to switch to a logarithmic scale in order to show the detail for the NSLU2 and WL-HDD. Once again, the WL-HDD turns in the slowest performance.

My conclusion from these results is that ASUS must have figured that most buyers would use the WL-HDD as a wireless-connected NAS - a fair assumption given the product's focus - where you'd probably never see these performance limitations.