6. Performance Tests

I used iozone as described on this page to test the SimpleShare's read and write performance. Since I was interested to see whether the product's encryption option affected performance, I tested both with and without encryption. I used the same setup of iozone running on my iBook (640 MB RAM) under OS X so that I could compare the performance of the SimpleShare with tests I've run on other devices. Note that the disk included with the SimpleShare is a Hitachi 7200 RPM, 250 GB drive with 8 MB of cache.

First I tested the SimpleShare without encryption, with Figures 8 and 9 showing the transfer rate over varying file and record sizes for read and write respectively. The zero-value areas at the left-front and right-rear of the graph are file and record sizes that weren't tested. The read test shows transfer rates between 4,000 and 8,000 kBytes/sec. The write test shows a rate varying between 3,000 and 5,000 kBytes/sec.

Figure 8: Unencrypted Read test
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Figure 9: Unencrypted Write test
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Next, I reran the test with an encrypted pool and Figures 10 and 11 show the result. With encryption on, the read test varied between 4,000 and 8,000 kBytes/sec, and the write test shows a rate varying between 3,000 and 5,000 kBytes/sec. This tells me that the encryption doesn't have much of an effect on the performance.

Figure 10: Encrypted Read test
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Figure 11: Encrypted Write test
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