6. Performance

When I started this review, I hoped that I'd be able to use this device across the network for heavy duty transfers, instead of using an external USB or Firewire drive. To see how well it performed, I used iozone to check the StorCenter's file system performance as described here.

The test was run under Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop with 384 MB of RAM. For my network setup, I used a Netgear GA511 gigabit PC card in my laptop, which was directly connected to the StorCenter with a network cable.

NOTE! How fast a computer can read or write data to a drive depends on many factors specific to the system running the test, so this test may not represent actual performance you'd see on your own system. The maximum theoretical data transfer rate one would expect to see on a 100Mbit network is around 12,000 kBps, so any values that exceed that number appear as a result of caching behavior, not network speed.

Figures 11 and 12 show read performance for a range of file and record sizes, using 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps Ethernet connections.

Figure 11: StorCenter Read Test results - 100 Mbps
(click for larger image)

If you look closely at the two plots, you can see that gigabit read performance peaks at close to 9,000 kBytes/sec, while peak read performance using 100 Mbps Ethernet tops out closer to 8,000 kBytes/sec.

Figure 12: StorCenter Read Test results - 1000 Mbps
(click for larger image)

Write test results for 100 and 1000 Mbps connections are shown in Figures 13 and 14 and exhibit similar high peak transfer writes due to filesystem caching.

Figure 13: StorCenter Write Test results - 100 Mbps
(click for larger image)

The real difference in non-cached performance can be found in the flat area at the front of the plots, which we'll be able to see better when we look at the comparison plots coming up next.

Figure 14: StorCenter Write Test results - 1000 Mbps
(click for larger image)