Benchmarks

I used a combination of synthetic and real-world tests to measure the performance of the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo Station NAS. For comparison, I threw it in the ring to duke it out with the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ that I reviewed back in March 2007 when Infrant Technologies was the company behind it (Infrant has since merged with Netgear).

The test configuration for the two NAS appliances is as follows:

The PC used for the tests is configured as follows:

● Intel Core2 Duo E6850 CPU @ 3.00 GHz

● ABIT IP35 Pro P35 “Bearlake” Motherboard (BIOS 11 – 07/09/07)

● 4GB Crucial Technologies Ballistix Tracer DDR-2 800 RAM (5-5-5-18 2T)

● (2) Western Digital 300GB Caviar (16MB Cache) 7200 SATA HD RAID 0 Stripe

● Windows XP Professional SP-2 w/latest critical updates

● Latest drivers for all hardware, NVIDIA ForceWare 169.28 Beta Drivers

The PC and both NAS units were connected to an SMC 8508T 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch which has Jumbo Frame support up to 9KB MTU.

Enabling Jumbo Frames can provide a noticeable improvement on overall network throughput—a plus when streaming video and transferring large files—especially when multiple computers are involved. Taking advantage of the additional performance, unfortunately, isn’t as easy as flipping a switch or clicking an option box. Getting over the first hurdle is easy. Since Gigabit Ethernet is a requirement for Jumbo Frames, your hardware and network cabling must be Gigabit–compliant. The hardware part isn’t difficult. Most PCs, NAS appliances, hubs and switches these days are Gigabit-ready. The weak link is the cabling. Your network cables must have a minimum CAT5E rating, which should be silkscreened directly on the cable. Of course, silk-screening can fade and wear off over the years, and there’s always the impulse to save a buck or two by purchasing the cheapest cable possible—which may not even be marked. If either scenario applies to your network, follow this simple rule: when in doubt, throw it out. Quality CAT5E Ethernet cable isn’t that expensive.

The actual implementation of Jumbo Frame support in the hardware is where you start running into hurdles. Not all consumer-level hubs or switches support Jumbo Frames. Check the manufacturer’s website. If Jumbo Frame support isn’t mentioned in the specs, chances are it’s not implemented in the product. Even when a hub, switch, NAS or network controller supports Jumbo Frames, the biggest hurdle to overcome is the available frame sizes of the hardware, and implementation of frame sizes. In order to get optimal performance from Jumbo Frames, devices across the network that support should be configured with the same frame size. This isn’t always as easy as it sounds. There’s no uniform “standard” for calculating frame sizes among different network devices and the manufacturers of those devices. Some, for example, include header information in the frame size. Others don’t.

What to do? Two things. You can follow the recommendation of the hardware manufacturer and leave Jumbo Frames off. Or, you can match the frame sizes on the devices as closely as humanly possible, and turn Jumbo Frames on. Will you get the optimal performance increase that you’d theoretically get if all the frame sizes on your network devices were identical? Probably not. But look at it this way: a free boost in network throughput—optimal or not—is better than none at all.

A share named BENCHMARK was created on both NAS units and mapped to a drive letter on the test PC. The synthetic test consists of using Iometer (Build 2006.07.27) to measure sequential reads and writes to drives mapped to the BENCHMARK share of each NAS, using a 1GB test file. You can get all the details behind the benchmark over at the Netgear ReadyNAS Community Support Forum here. The real world test involves copying over 7GB of digital photo, movies and music files from the local hard drive of the PC to the drives mapped to the BENCHMARK shares of each NAS. NetWorx 3.2—a network bandwidth monitoring and statistics utility, was used to record the amount of time it took to copy the files and the maximum transfer rate achieved during the process.

The ABIT IP35 Pro’s integrated Realtek RT8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC supports a maximum 7KB MTU Jumbo Frame. With Jumbo Frames enabled on the ReadyNAS NV+, the MTU is 7936 bytes. On the TS-409 Pro, it’s 7418 bytes. For both the synthetic and real-world tests, two sets of benchmarks were run and recorded. The first set was with Jumbo Frames turned off on all respective hardware; the second with Jumbo Frames enabled. First, the benchmark results with Iometer:

Here we see the most dramatic increase in throughput for both NAS units with Jumbo Frames enabled was the read portion of the Iometer benchmark. The TS-409 Pro and ReadyNAS NV+ are practically neck and neck, with the NV+ edging out the TS-409 Pro by a 2.62 MB/sec. With the exception of the lower scores for both, the scenario is pretty much the same with Jumbo Frames disabled. The writes portion of the benchmark is where things get interesting. While the increase in throughput isn’t as dramatic for the ReadyNAS NV+, it is still measurable. But take a look at the TS-409 Pro—barely any difference in throughput with Jumbo Frames on or off. I ran the benchmark several more times, but the results were pretty much the same.

Synthetic benchmarks are one thing. Let’s see if the pattern repeats itself on the file copy test where we actually copy a large number of files that vary in size down to both boxes.

Both the QNAP’s TS-409 Pro Turbo Station and Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ shaves nearly three minutes off the time it takes to copy the files to the drive mapped to their respective BENCHMARK shares with Jumbo Frames enabled. But Jumbo Frames enabled or not, the ReadyNAS NV+ does it faster and with higher maximum transfer rates. I ran this benchmark over several times as well, to make sure there was no error on my part. Again, the results were virtually identical. So what’s up with the TS-409 Pro? It’s safe to say we can rule out any data fragmentation due to frame size mismatch, just by looking at the numbers with Jumbo Frames disabled. Something else is going on here.

First and foremost, I think the TS-409 Pro is being hurt by its 256MB of RAM. The ReadyNAS NV+ with its 1GB of RAM has got the QNAP product outgunned. Another contributing factor might be the XRAID configuration of the NV+, compared to the more convention RAID 5 config on the TS-409 Pro. Though it was hardly by a jaw-dropping and heart-stopping amount, in my review of the ReadyNAS NV+, XRAID showed some performance benefits over a conventional RAID 5 setup on the NAS. I do feel however, that a mere 256MB of RAM in the TS-409 Pro, is at the heart of the problem.

Backuping up on the TS-409 Pro: Procedures and Performance

Regardless of how many PCs you have on your network, it’s important to back them up regularly to a safe, reliable medium. Nowadays, that medium is a NAS. You just can’t beat a network storage backup solution for speed, reliability and security. The TS-409 Pro makes an excellent, centralized “vault” for all your important files. It can also act as a stand-alone backup appliance for backing up computers on your network; perform secure, remote data replication to other TS-409’s; and transfer data from flash and external USB hard drives and photos from digital cameras via its USB ports, without having to power-up a PC or laptop.

Accessible under System ToolsàUSB one touch copy backup in QNAP Server Administration, The One Touch Copy Button can be configured to copy from almost any storage device connected to the front USB port, to any share on the TS-409 Pro. It can also be configured to copy from any share on the NAS, to a storage device connected to the USB port. It can also be disabled, if you choose.

There are three types of backups you can select for One Touch Copy Button. Copy copies to and from the destination folder, maintaining the existing folder and file structure of the data being transferred. Add directory creates a new date-stamped sequential folder for the folder and files being copied. Synchronize always deletes all data on the destination drive, and then synchronizes the data with the source drive. The blue USB LED next to the button flashes when data transfer to or from an external device is in progress, and the button is temporarily disabled until the transfer is complete (if you press it while the transfer is in progress, it will beep twice to remind you that the button is disabled).

More software publishers are turning to the downloadable content model for selling their products. They save a considerable amount of money not having to pay for box design and packaging, renting shelf-space in stores, not to mention the costs of CD and DVD discs—though they don’t mind offering the option of having your software burned to a disc and mailed to you for a “small fee.” A lot of the software I own has been purchased this way. And I like the convenience of being able to install my software directly from a NAS without having to dig through a bunch of dusty boxes and dragging out a ton of CDs. Then there’s all of those drivers, service packs; my important data, my iTunes library—and of course my huge collection of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion mods. While I certainly feel a lot more secure with it all sitting on a RAID 5 array of a NAS, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to back it up every now and then. The only thing that would suck more than trying to burn it all on DVDs would be to lose it all in a worse case scenario meltdown of the NAS. Never underestimate the power and resourcefulness of that Murphy guy…

That’s what makes Back Up To An External Storage Device on the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo Station NAS so useful. With 750GB and 1TB hard drives dropping in price, you can pop one in a hard drive enclosure with a USB interface and use it to back up your data from the NAS for safekeeping. You can use the front USB port, but you’re not limited to it as you can use the USB ports in back of the TS-409 Pro as well.

Under System ToolsàBack up to an external storage device in Server Administration, you’re presented with a list of all the shares (which are referred to here as network drives) on the TS-409 Pro, that you can pick and choose from to backup—or not. Your backup options are: Do not backup, which is self-explanatory. Backup Now, which does what it says as soon as you select network drives and click the OK button. Schedule backup allows you to select the hour and day of the week to run a backup. Auto-backup kicks off a backup of any selected network drives as soon as the TS-409 Pro detects a hard drive plugged into any of its USB ports. You have a choice of performing either Copy or Synchronize backups, with the usual caveats of the contents of the destination drive being deleted and then synchronized with the source drive if you choose the Synchronize option—with these exceptions:

● If the identical files exist on the destination and source, the files aren’t copied.

● If the files have the same name but are different in size or date on the TS-409 Pro and the external drive, the files on the external drive are overwritten.

The TS-409 Pro can read and write to external hard drives that are formatted with either the FAT or EXT3 format. Any drives formatted with the Windows NTFS file system will be treated as read-only.

Some retail external hard drives—many which are designated as NAS devices or storage backup solutions and have their own backup and network utilities, may also have proprietary partition and file systems that at the very least, won’t play nice with the TS-409 Pro’s Back Up To An External Storage Device function. At the very worse, it could do some damage to those partitions and file systems. Especially if Auto-backup is enabled and someone plugs the drive into the NAS. If you have such a drive and are thinking about using it, get in touch with the vendor and find out whether or not it’s safe to use with the TS-409 Pro. If not, you can always get a regular hard drive and generic USB enclosure. It’s a lot cheaper than inadvertently trashing and voiding the warranty on your more expensive, full-featured external drives.