Depending on your hard drive configuration and hard drives selected, your performance will very greatly with the QNAP TS-209 Pro II. I will be using two Seagate 7200.11 500GB, 32MB cache, NCQ hard drives (ST3500320AS SD15). The hard drives have been flashed with the latest firmware and I’ve had no performance problems with them – I know many of you have had issues with Seagate 7200.11 drives. I guess I lucked out. The NAS was connected up to my network through a D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit router. Also connected to this router is my primary test bed from which files will be copied to and from. My test bed consists of:

• CPU: Intel C2D Q6600 (G0 SLACR L731B434)

• CPU Cooling: Thermalright HR-01 w/ 120 mm Antec Tri-Cool Fan
• MB: Asus P5E3-Dlx Wifi-AP Edition
• RAM: Aeneon 2×2GB XTune DDR3-1600 (AXH860UD20-16H) @ 1800Mhz 10-10-10-30 1T
• NB/SB/PWM Cooling: Stock
• GPU: Sapphire HD 4850 X2
• PSU: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W
• Primary HD: Seagate SATA 80GB 8MB NCQ 7200RPM
• Secondary HD: Seagate SATA 400GB 8MB NCQ 7200RPM
• OS: Windows XP SP2

The primary benchmarking application will be IOzone followed by a run of ATTO DiskBench and Crystal Disk Mark. First, here’s a blurb on IOzone and how it works:

IOzone is a file system benchmark tool. The benchmark generates and measures a variety of file operations. IOzone has been ported to many machines and runs under many operating systems. IOzone is useful for performing a broad file system analysis of a vendor’s computer platform. While computers are typically purchased with an application in mind it is also likely that over time the application mix will change. Many vendors have enhanced their operating systems to perform well for some frequently used applications. Although this accelerates the I/O for those few applications it is also likely that the system may not perform well for other applications that were not targeted by the operating system. An example of this type of enhancement is: Database. Many operating systems vendors have tested and tuned the file system so it works well with databases. While the database users are happy, the other users may not be so happy as the entire system may be giving all of the system resources to the database users at the expense of all other users. As time rolls on the system administrator may decide that a few more office automation tasks could be shifted to this machine. The load may now shift from a random reader application (database) to a sequential reader. The users may discover that the machine is very slow when running this new application and become dissatisfied with the decision to purchase this platform. By using IOzone to get a broad file system performance coverage the buyer is much more likely to see any hot or cold spots and pick a platform and operating system that is more well balanced.

IOzone is a command line operated testing utility; we will be using the following command.
iozone -Rab [filename] -i 0 -i 1 -q2 56K -n 32M -g 4G -f [test location]

‘-i 0 -i 1′ Write/ Re-Write, Read/ Re-Read tests
Read: Performance measured by reading an existing file
Re-Read: Reading a file which has already been read, tests the utilization of cache
Write: Performance of writing a file to the disk
Re-Write: Re- Writes a file that already exists on the disk
‘-q 64k’ Maximum record size of 64Kb, 4Kb, 8Kb, 16Kb, 32Kb, 64Kb
‘-n 32M -g 4G’ Minimum file size of 32MB and maximum file size of 4GB
‘[file name].xls’ Location where to write test results
‘[test location]‘ Target of tests

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