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 : Thecus N4800
We have been evaluating the Thecus N4800, a 4-bay NAS unit based on the Atom D2700, over the last couple of months. A full length detailed review is forthcoming, but we'll take this opportunity to present the results of the newly added test suite components for the N4800 with four disks in RAID5. 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 Thecus N4800 are available here.
The full power of dual LAN ports with link aggregation is seen in these results, particularly for the 100% sequential read and 50% sequential read / 50% sequential write case. In the latter, we are able to hit as much as 210 MBps with ten clients active. The Thecus N4800 seems to hold up much better when compared to the Synology DS211+ as the number of clients increases. With just twelve simultaneous clients, we don't see a marked decrease in performance at any given node, unlike what we saw with the Synology DS211+ in the previous section. However, this is only to be expected because of the hardware configuration.
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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!