Building the 2012 AnandTech SMB / SOHO NAS Testbed
by Ganesh T S on September 5, 2012 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Storage
- NAS
Testbed in Action : Synology DS211+
One of the first NAS units that we put through our new test suite was the Synology DS211+. The following four graphs show the total available bandwidth and the average response time while being subject to different types of workloads through IOMeter. IOMeter also reports various other metrics of interest such as maximum response time, read and write IOPS, separate read and write bandwidth figures, etc. Selected metrics from the evaluation of the Synology DS211+ are available here. The values corresponding to the points plotted below can also be seen in the above link.
The first graph shows that the DS211+ is able to hit as high as 112.65 MBps in 100% sequential reads when five clients are simultaneously accessing the unit. However, for more than 7 clients, the total available bandwidth sees a decrease. In all the four cases, the average response time seems to increase only linearly. However, a look at the maximum response time in the above link shows that under some conditions, clients need to wait for as much as 10 seconds for a transaction to complete.
The Synology DS211+ seems to be a good fit for cases where there are 5 - 10 computers simultaneously accessing the unit, but performance seems to degrade with additional users.
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waldo - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
Some of the biggest problems I have found in running my small business related to NAS's is file integrity under load. Is there a way to see if they have file integrity issues under load? Not just i/o or response times.Also, it would be interesting to see how their "feature set" holds up under load, as all of the NAS's purport to offer a variety of additional services other than purely file access/storage. Or is that only applicable to your lengthier reviews?
Lastly, most of these nas's don't have version tracking or something similar, so in a media setup, it would be interesting to see how they handle accessing the same file at the same time....can they serve it multiple times to multiple clients?
waldo - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
One last thought...it would be interesting to see free nas or some other DIY as an alternative.Peanutsrevenge - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
Top marks!Bet it was satisfying when the SSH script was comlpete, just press this button and .....
tygrus - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link
How big a NAS can you test ? Does the server slow it down when testing 7+ virtual client load against NAS ? What is the client/host CPU usage, host system_cpu%, VM overhead ?Please test the server by running simultaneous tests to multiple NAS. Compare 6 clients alone to 1 NAS at a time with 2 sets of 6 clients to 2 NAS (or 3x4, 4x3). Is there any difference ? Is the test affected by the testbed CPU speed (try using a faster CPU eg. E5-2670) ? Can you test 16 or 24 clients (1 server) with 2 VM / SSD. Might need more RAM ? Now we are getting less SMB / SOHO and more enterprise :)
jwcalla - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link
I got a bit of a chuckle out of G.Skill sending you non-ECC RAM.ganeshts - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link
That is OK for our application :) We aren't running this workstation in a 'production' environment.bobbozzo - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link
Curious, would ECC RAM use noticeably more power?extide - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link
Why would they bother with ECC ram? Totally un-needed for this application..bsd228 - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link
ECC is absolutely needed for this application - Data integrity matters, not just data throughput.bobbozzo - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link
Page 2, in the sentence"Out of the three processors, we decided to go ahead with the hexa-core Xeon E5-2630L"
The URL in the HREF has a space in it, and therefore doesn't work.
Thanks for the article!