Thecus N5550 5-Bay Home NAS Review

RAID 6 Benchmarking

RAID 6 Benchmarks:

For this page of benchmarks, we will setup the drives as a RAID 6 array with a 128KB stripe and no spare. RAID 6 extends RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block; thus it uses block-level striping with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks. You take a small performance hit for this, but it worth it for those using large capacity disks.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The test was performed with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

The Thecus N5550 with the Western Digital Red 3TB drives in a RAID 6 array was able to hit a max of ~101MB/s read and ~118MB/s write.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

With Crystal Disk Mark the sequential read and writes topped out at 64.9 MB/s read, and 106.8MB/s write. Remember the fastest you can go on a Gigabit LAN is 125MB/s, so these write speeds are fast!

Intel NAS Performance Toolkit Exerciser

The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network attached storage (NAS) devices. Intel NASPT focuses on user level performance using real world workload traces gathered from typical digital home applications such as HD video playback and record, data backup and restore utilities, office productivity applications, video rendering/content creation and more. Intel NASPT reproduces the file system traffic observed in these traces onto whatever storage solution the user provides, records the system response, and reports a rich variety of performance information. The end result is readily comparable performance measurements that are useful to developers as well as intuitive and compelling to consumers. The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit is one of the only benchmarks that was designed from the ground up just to measure NAS performance. The benchmark tests 18 different test scenarios to give you a great overall idea of how the NAS performs.

The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit showed that HD video playback was around 50 MB/s, which isn’t too shabby. The other scores can be seen in the image above.

When copying files to the NAS we had very good results in real world tests. Here we used Teracopy to upload 500MB .exe over to the NAS and it completed in just 5 seconds at 92MB/s.

Moving a 720P HD movie that was 1.8GB in size over took just 18 seconds and completed at 96MB/s! Not bad for a RAID 6 array!

Pulling files back down from the NAS was a bit slower, but we still average right around 50MB/s for most file types. Here it took 10 seconds to download a ~500MB file form the NAS. It took 5.5 seconds to upload the same file to the NAS.