5. Performance

I measured read and write file system performance for the device using the iozone tool as described here. All tests were run under Windows XP SP2 on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop with 384 MB of RAM installed.

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.

Figure 8: Read test results for the TS-U200
(click on image for larger version)

Figure 8 shows the results of the read test, while Figure 9 shows the write test. Peak (cached) write performance is in line with other consumer NAS devices I've tested, but peak read is on the low end.

Figure 9: Write test results for the TS-U200
(click on image for larger version)

To put these results in perspective, I also ran the same iozone tests against a number of similar devices, including:

The comparative results shown in Figures 10 and 11 are taken with a 128 MByte file size, which is large enough to bypass OS caching effects and show the hardware-limited performance of NAS devices.

Figure 10: Comparative read test results
(click on image for larger version)

You can see that the TS-U200 falls at the bottom of the pack. In fact, the next slowest device is more than twice as fast as the TS-U200. For comparison, the NSLU2 - which also uses an external USB 2.0 drive - clocks in four times faster when writing.

Since the TS-U200 did so poorly in these tests, I ran them twice to make sure something hadn't gone wrong, but it didn't help. I even took the same USB enclosure and drive, plugged it into the USB port of a Maxtor Shared Storage NAS [reviewed here] and ran an iozone test, with significantly better results. So it appears that TRENDnet clearly has plenty of room to improve the TS-U200's performance!

Figure 11: Comparative write test results
(click on image for larger version)