QNAP TS-451+ SOHO NAS Review

Multi-Client CIFS Performance for Consumer Workloads

The workloads experienced by a NAS unit in a typical home consumer setting have changed quite a bit over the last few years. Multiple mobile devices in a typical household raise the possibility that a NAS could be subject to the streaming out of multiple video files simultaneously. The popularity of IP cameras also make it necessary for NAS units to be able to record multiple video streams at the same time.

In our previous NAS reviews, we evaluated multi-client scenarios using synthetic workload traces and IOMeter. While there is nothing wrong in presenting numbers from such benchmarks, the reader is often left confused as to what those numbers might mean for his particular use-cases. Intel's NASPT benchmarking program gives us a good idea of the performance of the NAS unit when accessed by a single client. We took the source code of Intel's NASPT along with the supplied application traces and tweaked them to be able to run from more than one Windows client simultaneously in a co-ordinated manner. The graphs below present the results from tracking various metrics during the course of the benchmark runs. It must be noted that the average service times refer to what is obtained for all the traces when some of the data has already been cached in the client's memory. Unfortunately, NASPT doesn't provide any sort of guideline on what the optimal bandwidth and service times are for a good user experience.

Content Creation

The Content Creation workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 6 clients. Beyond that, we have a noticeable drop in the per-client bandwidth numbers. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

Folder Copy from NAS

The Folder Copy from NAS workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 10 clients (maximum that we tested). The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

Folder Copy to NAS

The Folder Copy to NAS workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 6 clients. Beyond that, we have a saturation of the total throughput despite being on a 802.3ad link. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

File Copy from NAS

The File Copy from NAS workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 4 clients. Beyond that, the total available bandwidth plateaus well below the link-aggregation limit, indicating an IOPS issue. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

File Copy to NAS

The File Copy to NAS workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 6 clients. Beyond that, we have a sudden spike in the average response time. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

HD Video (1x) Playback

The HD Video (1x) Playback workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 3 clients. Beyond that, we have a plateau slightly below the link-aggregation limit. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

HD Video(1x) Playback and Record

The HD Video(1x) Playback and Record workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 4 clients. Beyond that, we have a plateauing of the total bandwidth number. Thanks to the full-duplex nature of the NICs, we are able to cross the 250 MBps mark (thanks to the simultaneous reads and writes through the LAN). The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

HD Video (1x) Record

The HD Video (1x) Record workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 4 clients. Beyond that, we have a sudden spike in the average response time. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

HD Video (2x) Playback

The HD Video (2x) Playback workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 3 clients. Beyond that, the total available bandwidth plateaus. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

HD Video (4x) Playback

The HD Video (4x) Playback workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 3 clients. Beyond that, the total available bandwidth plateaus. The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

Office Productivity

The Office Productivity workload seems to get acceptable performance for up to 10 clients (maximum that we tested). The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

Photo Album

The Photo Album workload also seems to get acceptable performance for up to 10 clients (maximum we tested). The detailed table with a breakdown of all the throughput numbers as well as the service times is available here

The detailed logs from the processing of our benchmarks - inclusive of metrics such as the file open times for each workload on each of the clients - can be found here