Patriot Javelin S4 Media Storage Server Review

This is a really basic test where I simply took a very large compressed file and copied it to and from the Javelin. There are a lot of variables with a test like this including performance of the data switch involved, level of compression, performance of the local and remote drives, and ability for the OS and the Motherboard to pass and queue data in and out of the TCP stack. However, it gives you a general idea of what you might get on your home network with a slight margin of error. You can clearly see that the SATA II drives were a big improvement over the SATAI 14MB/s down and 40MB/s with increases of 240% and 285% respectively.

Crystal Disk Mark is a standard disk performance testing package that utilizes random reads and writes of different sizes to show how a disk drive(s) performs with both sequential and distributed access. As you move down the chart the drive is asked to break the data up considerably mean the heads have to move all over the drive significantly degrading performance. In this test you can start to see the impact of using the WD Green drives over the WD Black drives. The Black series would provide you with better performance, especially in writing, with the 4k and 4k with a queue depth of 32K given the 7200 RPM spindle speed but with the trade off of higher noise and heat.

Patriot Javelin S4 ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47:

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool measures your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. While this program is a bit long in the tooth it still provides a nice snapshot of performance levels for your NAS. However, on a Gigabit Network and today’s modern PC’s the speed and number of hard drives you are striping across has the most influence on the results. Again I would suspect if your going for maximum performance you would get better numbers running faster 7200 RPM drives.

Patriot Javelin S4 Intel NAS Performance Toolkit:

For this test you have to reduce your RAM to 2GB or below or the OS will start caching the data and skew your results. I removed my 16GB Vengence kit and put in a single stick of 2GB Kingston Hyper X H2O 2133MHz for this test. For some reason I kept getting errors on the directory copy from NAS and could not resolve it so I simply did not run that test but you can still get a feel for the performance.

Given a typical blue-ray stream is approximately 4.5 MB/s, based on these tests the Javelin with the 4x WD Green drives in RAID 5 could easily support 13 simultaneous 1080p streams of video. This should cover the majority of video junkies and make you question that NetFlix subscription. Overall this is excellent performance for a remotely attached storage solution and should be able to accommodate anything you throw at the Patriot Javelin S4.