6. Performance

To check performance on the two products, I ran the iozone tool using the test methodology described here. In my specific case, iozone was running under OSX version 10.4.1 on my iBook, which is loaded with 640 MB of RAM. The disk I used is a 120 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 7200 RPM drive with 8 MB of cache and ATA/133 interface. As you peruse the results, keep in mind that the maximum raw data rate for 100Mbps Ethernet is 12500 kBytes/sec.

First, I ran iozone against the Net-Stor, with Figures 9 and 10 showing read and write runs respectively.

Figure 9: Net-Stor Read Performance
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The tests show the performance is lower than the other drives I've tested, which typically have speeds between 6-8 kBytes/sec for read and 5-6 kBytes/sec for write.

Figure 10: Net-Stor Write Performance
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Running the same tests against the Simple NAS, however, shows even poorer performance (Figures 11 and 12). Especially of note is that read performance is worse than write - the opposite of what I've observed with other drives.

Figure 11: Simple NAS Read Performance
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Figure 12: Simple NAS Write Performance
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