4. Performance

When I ran a performance test on the Hawking Net-Stor, it ranked dead last. So I hoped that when ADS updated the firmware, they had improved filesystem performance. I measured read and write performance using the iozone tool as described here. The test was run under Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop with 384 MB of RAM.

To put the results in perspective, I also ran the same iozone tests against similar BYOD products, i.e. Linksys NSLU2, Tritton Simple NAS, and Hawking Net-Stor.

NOTES
- How fast a computer can read / write data to a drive depends on many factors that are specific to the system running the test. So this test may not represent the performance you would see on your own system.

- The maximum theoretical speed one can expect to see on a 100Mbit network is around 12,000 kBytes/Second, so any values in excess of this are due to caching effects.

Figure 7: ADS Write performance
(click image to enlarge)

Comparing Figures 7 and 8, it appears that ADS has done some tweaking to improve write performance over Hawking's product. Note that the Hawking plot below shows better performance than Figure 10 on this page. This is due to my changeover to using WinXP instead of Mac OS X for my NAS testing, with Win XP having better cached performance.

Figure 8: Hawking Net-Stor Write performance
(click image to enlarge)