We received the ioSafe preinstalled with 2x1TB disks which are featured on their qualified HDD list. The drives in question are Western Digital WD10EFRX 1TB NAS, also called the WD RED series. Their performance is quite good for drive with spinning platters. Keep the fact that a normal HDD (not SSD) was used in the performance tests below.

For client <> server benchmark we used a Dell Laptop, E6520 with 240Gb SSD equipped, used a single UTP cable to connect laptop directly to the NAS.

We configured a shared drive on the ioSafe 214, we also mounted a volume through iSCSI. In the charts below you can see that SMB for all results with data to the shared folder, iSCSI for data exchange with the iSCSI volume.

Intel NAS Performance Toolkit

Intel's NAS performance toolkit is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage (NAS) performance. Designed to emulate the behavior of an actual application, NASPT uses a set of real world workload traces gathered from typical digital home applications. Traces of high definition video playback and recording, office productivity applications, video rendering/content creation and more provide a broad range of different application behaviors.

With this application the results can get skewed if you run in on a system with a lot memory, we limited our test laptop to 2Gb. Even with 2Gb we can see caching causing some skewed results, but on the other hand it does reflect real world usage... keep this in mind when viewing the results:

In this test we can see that having a volume mounted with iSCSI delivers higher throughput, the difference is small is some cases, with iSCSI the system does rely more on caching.

Simple Big / Small File Copy Task

A single big 3Gb file was copied TO/FROM the NAS. Then a 3Gb collection of very small files was also copied.

iSCSI is visibly slower, the cache which might have played a part in the Intel NASPT benchmark is now rendered useless. Performance over SMB is stellar, maxing out the 1Gbit LAN connection.

Smaller files means cache can play a role, and we see the end results here; on average the SMB share provides superior.

What can take away from these test results? If you copy large files to/from this NAS you'll quickly max out your network connection, smaller files provide more of a challenge, but the performance remains high overall, even with the two regular disks inside!