Single Client Access - NAS Benchmarks

Evaluation of single client performance in a networked environment was done by configuring three drives in RAID-5 in the QNAP TS-EC1279U-SAS-RP unit. Two of the network links were bonded (configured with 802.3ad LACP). Our usual Intel NASPT / robocopy benchmarks were processed from a virtual machine in our NAS testbed. The results are presented in the graphs below.

HD Video Playback

2x HD Playback

4x HD Playback

HD Video Record

HD Playback and Record

Content Creation

Office Productivity

File Copy to NAS

File Copy from NAS

Dir Copy to NAS

Dir Copy from NAS

Photo Album

robocopy (Write to NAS)

robocopy (Read from NAS)

For almost all workloads, there is no discernible difference between the performance of various drives, indicating that it is the network acting as a bottleneck for single client access. Differences start to appear when there are multiple clients accessing the NAS.

Single Client Access - DAS Benchmarks Multi-Client Access - NAS Environment
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  • Laststop311 - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link

    Price/reliability/performance I think this is the best series of drives to purchase.
  • akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link

    You're absolutely correct. I own many Hitachi drives compared to WD and Seagate models.
  • realwarder - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link

    I purchased two of these and put them in a Dell server as RAID drives. It was curious to read about the Qnap IO error as the drives failed to operate correctly in the server to start with - when on SATA channel 2/3 they always got an IO error during the boot which caused Windows Storage Spaces to reject the drives. On moving to channel 0/1 they show no I/O error at boot and work fine.

    Once working, they appear ok if not a little noisy. Run 4 degrees warmer than the boot drive too.

    Only time will tell how they work out, but it's a lot of fast space which is what I was after - just look a lot of pain to get working due to the IO error causing the drive rejection.
  • StevieBee - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link

    Some advice please folks.. I have 2x8 bay synology drives ( 1815+) which i use for SOHO file backup and some media on a very small network of 3 users. At the moment i have 5 3TB WD reds in each and i want to add another 3 drives to each.

    My question is what are the best drives to add to the array? Reliability is more an issue than cost.

    I was at first thinking about WD red Pro, but i am worried that the higher speed than my existing reds would cause a problem...Will it?

    The other alternative would be to make one unit all the new deckstars with the higher speed, and then use the old WD reds to increase the other unit.

    Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

    Merry Christmas

    Steve
  • intiims - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link

    Great review from a great site. Nice Products Spec tables, very usefull and easy to understand.
    Guspaz: I think little and fast SDD drives are much better than big and slow, by the way, who can fill up 8TB ? I have never ever got more than 1TB. Even with a lot of movies and photos..
    I found i nice site witth great reviews:
    http://hddex.blogspot.com/
  • akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link

    @However, the HGST Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD drives.

    Ganesh, that's a wrong comparison. Deskstar HDDs are targeted at Consumer or SOHO or even SMB segment. Why? Because it gets quite easy to go for RAID by adding a few HDDs in the Cases. Rest is all known.

    If folks (like me) looking for Enterprise-grade drives, go for Hitachi's SAS 12 GB/s HDDs to get very high performance and ultra reliability. One can even choose SATA III HDD drives too. Most important is to know when to use those models. E.g.,

    a) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SAS 12Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
    b) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
    c) Hitachi Deskstar NAS SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD

    Those three drives may look more or less same, but they aren't!

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