Synology: NAS Speed Testing

With the two paired together, we did some quick configuration on the Synology box. The 212+ has a *lot* of features to choose from:

For the moment we were only focused on getting an eSATA-connected SoloPRO to appear on the network. After a couple of clicks through the DiskStation’s interface, voala:

The Synology box appears no different than any other shareing host on your network, and the eSATA port appears as a shared folder. USB connected devices work in a similar fashion. With the connection made and the share mounted, it’s time for some file copies. We used large file copies – ISO images of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The drive sitting on the host side of the file copies was a 512GB Samsung 830 Series SSD connected via SATA 6Gb/sec (clearly not the bottleneck here). Now for the results:

Read (copy from ioSafe via NAS):

Write (copy to ioSafe via NAS):

These numbers, while good, seemed a bit on the low side, especially since I was seeing faster transfer rates when moving the same files to and from the DiskStation’s internal storage. At first I thought this might just be the 212+ not handling eSATA as well as its own internal storage. Investigation revealed it was indeed an overhead related problem, but not one of hardware. The ioSafe was formatted NTFS in the above tests, and the DiskStation is not a Windows machine. This means the NAS had to do extra work to interface with the NT File System. Matching the ioSafe to the native (and preferred) format of the DiskStation required a reformat under the Linux EXT4 file system:

With the ioSafe formatted EXT4, let’s see how much nicer it plays with the DiskStation:

 

Read (copy from ioSafe via NAS):

 

Write (copy to ioSafe via NAS):

That’s more like it. Big difference there. These speeds were nearly identical to what we saw when doing the same copies to and from the DiskStation’s internal array, and while they were not the 90+ MB/sec rated you’d see on iSCSI over GigE (which is possible if you’re willing to stick with a point-to-point link), they were certainly acceptable for a Samba-based share.

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