The title of this post was used to be "My FreeNAS #2", which continue from where we left off. But not long after I setup my home-brew NAS server, I saw a Promise NS4300N at Fry's for $350..... damn, why it has not come out earlier?

Fast forward to present, I just can't passed off a neat toy:



I plugged in 4 Western Digital WD4000AAKS SATA HDD, and setup a RAID-5 with 1.2TB total capacity.

One of the major disappointment I have with my FreeNAS server is its poor performance (given it has a very powerful CPU). I just can't get more than 4MB/sec out of it over a Gb switch.

So I did some benchmarking to see how well the NS4300N behaves. The test is done by copying to/from a 1.4GB avi movie file.

The first test is to transfer the file using my T60 running Fedora 9 over Wifi using SMB (aka Windows file-sharing), just to see how bad it is. The transfer goes through a 802.11G link of ~20 feet away from D-link DI-624 wireless router, then pass over a 100Mb ethernet link to Netgear GS608, which send the data down a 1Gb ethernet link to the NS4300N. The test showing a 0.7MB/sec write to NAS, and 1.8MB/sec to read. What this really mean in real-life? A choppy avi movie playing on my T60.....

In the second test, I copy the file back and fore from Fedora 9 over the 1Gb ethernet on the GS608. The write speed is at 1.5MB/sec and reading at 7.9MB/sec. A good improvement.

Then I repeat the test on a Aopen miniPC running Windows XP SP3, 1.2Ghz P4 I used as HTPC (and which I should write about sometimes in the future). The result is amazing at 10MB/sec write to and 16MB/sec read from. It's actually in-line with SmallNetBuilder.

You can tell I am happy about NS4300N's performance. There was complains that the drive tray is too flimsy, but I am ok with that. The only con I see is the NAS fan is way too noisy.

Further food for thoughts:
- I am wondering how come the performance on Fedora 9/T60 is so bad.
- I am also wondering how jumbo frame going to make a different. I have setup on NS4300N to do 4KB jumbo frame, but I thought the other end also need some setup?
- Another test I should run is to see how NFS and FTP perform vs SMB.
- I recently bought a pair of ZyXel PLA-401 HomeplugAV adaptor, wondering how thing behave over it.

Stay tuned for part 3.