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drdamour

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I just got the LinkSys NAS200 device, and i'm dissapointed in the performance. I have a bunch of mp3s on it, and when i try to open them up through explorer it takes at least 5 seconds for WiMP or iTunes to bring them up. Also, it's taking a LIFETIME for iTunes to "anaylize gapless playback".

Once the audio (or video) is loaded, it runs pretty smoothly, and i can jump around in the file, but if i click next it takes another 5 seconds for the next song or movie to start playing.

I've read the reviews on the NAS200 and they say that it IS slow, but almost every other product i've read up states the same slowness problems, wether it is d-link, netgear, buffalo, Western Digital, etc.

Is there a great perofrmance model in the sub $250 range? OR do i need to go to the $1000 route to get what i want. Anyone have any experience with a really good one? Does the gigbit port on some of these really matter? I've heard that it's gigabit in name only, and the firmware or controllers are the bottleneck and not the 100MBs ethernet link.

if this is in the wrong forum, then please move it.
 
I have the ReadyNAS NV+ and I don't notice any lag when running files off of it. I also have a gigabit router and gigabit ports for all my computers. I am sure it does not actually realize full gigabit speed, but it plenty fast enough for me.
 
I have the Thecus N5200B. 5 SATA bays, dual gigabit, and one of the faster processors available in a NAS appliance. I put 5x500GB WD drives in it, and run RAID 5, which got me around 1.9TB useable.

Apart from some minor issues with the web GUI, I love the thing. It is fast, stable, and quiet.

It would probably be around $1000 these days, fully populated with 400-500GB drives. The appliance by itself is around $550 I think. You can start with one drive and expand, supposedly, but I felt more comfortable buying all the drives up front to be sure I would have identical models.
 
I have a ReadyNAS nv+, which I love - Unfortunately, one of the first things netgear did when they bough infrant was raise the prices. The other solution I own, which is very cheap and quite similar in terms of feature set is the Promise NS4300N. It's a 4 bay, Gb Ethernet, RAID-5 NAS. It's also the cheapest NAS I can find. I'm pretty sure I saw it in Japan under another name, so it's unclear if it's made by Promise or just re-branded.

http://www.provantage.com/promise-ns4300n~7PROM15A.htm

$385.00 with no drives. Mine runs 4x500 RAID-5 (previously in the Infrant, which is now 4x750). With Gb and Jumbo Frames enabled (9k), performance is fine for the A/V distribution and backup services that I use. The rest of my network is Netgear GS105s and GS108s.
 
What are you ReadyNAS guys getting for transfer speeds?

I consistently get in the 20MB/sec range with my Thecus N5200
 
I've got a Buffalo Terastation Pro 1.0TB. It's pre-loaded with four 250GB SATA drives and supports RAID 0/1/5/10. It also supports adding external USB drives. I've been using it for about a year with no problems so far. They run in the $600 range these days.
 
ezrem said:
What are you ReadyNAS guys getting for transfer speeds?

I consistently get in the 20MB/sec range with my Thecus N5200
Click to expand...

I will check when I get home tonight. Is there any particular program that you use to test network speed, or should I just copy a big file from my computer to the NAS?
 
Well, I'm using Vista, and if you expand the file copy window, it tells you the transfer speed.

You could always just time a file copy of a 1gb file or something and see how long it takes.

I am definitely talking large files, not a folder full of 10000 little 50kb files or something.
 
If your NAS supports FTP, that would probably be more accurate than an SMB file copy.
 
Minsc said:
If your NAS supports FTP, that would probably be more accurate than an SMB file copy.
Click to expand...

While true, how often do you do your file transfers over anything other than SMB?

If you're streaming video to anything, it's probably going to be SMB traffic. If you're dumping files to the NAS, it's probably to a shared network drive.

I'm not saying you won't get a much more detailed throughput reading from an FTP transfer, just that SMB traffic isn't necessarily going to move at the same speed as FTP.
 
I agree. In your case, Vista is much better than XP at displaying transfer speeds accurately on file transfers, so some people like to test using FTP for benchmark purposes since FTP clients do a much better job of measuring throughput.

But, ultimately, I agree that most transfers are going to be SMB.
 
An alternative is to get an inexpensive desktop with on-board gigabit and use it to share files. The hardware on consumer desktops is much faster than consumer NAS boxes, and for gigabit transfers this can make a difference.
 
ezrem said:
What are you ReadyNAS guys getting for transfer speeds?

I consistently get in the 20MB/sec range with my Thecus N5200
Click to expand...

Wow. That's pretty good. I'm using jumbo frames on my TS with a Linksys SR2016 switch, and I get about 17-18MB best case.
 
For comparison, a typical desktop should be able to do around 30 MB/s; potentially much higher.
 
The Thecus box has some pretty beefy hardware in it (800MHz Pentium M or something like that), and I also upgraded mine from the default 256MB RAM to 512MB, which helps throughput quite a bit.
 
ezrem said:
The Thecus box has some pretty beefy hardware in it (800MHz Pentium M or something like that), and I also upgraded mine from the default 256MB RAM to 512MB, which helps throughput quite a bit.
Click to expand...

The N5200 has a 600 MHz Celeron-M. At release, it was probably the fastest such device.

The N5200 Pro has a 1.5 GHz Celeron-M -- almost certainly a class-leader in this category.

But to put this in perspective, it's still not as fast in CPU terms as a budget modern desktop.

The CPU speed is just one indication. The real metric is transfer speed. Small Net Builder's NAS charts have more information on performance in this category. Unfortunately they have nothing on the N5200 Pro at present that I saw.

Here's what Thecus said about the N5200 Pro:

In all tests, the Thecus N5200 PRO performance is better than any competition. With IOMETER we reached up to 35MBps for writing data and up to 40MBps for reading from the NAS.
Click to expand...

I hope they made some mistakes in their test setup, because these numbers are still kind of low. Granted, they're better than the number I gave for a random single-drive desktop, 30 MB/s, but a desktop configured with RAID such as the Thecus would have been can easily beat this number.
 
If you look at their graphs, at least I think it was at Smallnetbuilder, all those 35-40mb/sec transfer rates are only achieved with smaller files. I'm fairly certain this is because everything is hitting the cache.

When you transfer larger files, 20-25mb/sec starts becoming the norm.

When I was thinking 800 MHz, I forgot that you had to overclock the CPU to achieve this speed. It's just a jumper on the motherboard, I believe.

In either case, you're correct that the processor is nowhere near a current low-end desktop, but it doesn't need to be. It's just running a busybox linux install, and all it does is serve files via SMB, FTP and HTTP. Using these lower end low-voltage processors means less power consumption, less heat, and most importantly (to me at least) less noise.

You could definitely roll your own faster NAS with a low-end core 2 duo or an old P4 or something, but it would run a lot louder, and be about 4x the size. It also wouldn't be that much less money than the Thecus once you get a decent hardware raid card, unless you already have some of the hardware laying around.
 
Well,

In my very unscientific test, the readyNAS got about 15 mb/sec. That is copying a ~500mb file off the network share in XP without jumbo frames.
 
I have the Thecus N5200 (non-Pro). I get consistent 30 MB/s writes on my RAID 5 setup with 4xWD5000AAKS.
 
Here is a performance comparison of a desktop build vs. one of the fastest NAS boxes currently on Small Net Builder's charts. The Thecus data is from SNB. The "DIY" build is a sample build I made for comparison, a 2 GHz Athlon64 with 512 MiB RAM running XP Home with on-board nVIDIA RAID 5 and on-board nVIDIA gigabit.

I used the same test method as SNB for direct comparison.

IOZone-DIY-RAID5-vs-Thecus.png


But this is fairly off-topic from the OP's point of view. I didn't mean to get into a big "DIY vs consumer NAS" debate. I mean only to point out that modern desktops can and generally do perform well.

OP: If you have another desktop handy or can borrow one, I suggest putting some files there and trying them out. If both computers have gigabit NICs, you can also test the effects of gigabit networking by using a direct connection between the computers. Gigabit does not require crossover cables. You're right -- at the low budget level, most NAS boxes don't have gigabit level performance even if they have gigabit NICs.
 
For whatever reason, they now call a file sharing Server a NAS. I must have missed that (very stupid) memo. Just build your own Server. It'll be faster, more versatile and you can actually do something with it other than just serve files.

-Robert
 
thanks for all your input, i was afraid you would say that.

How can a gernal PC be faster then a dedicate appliance? i mean i get the money factor, but you would think they coudl make some pretty cheap asics to server some damn files.

looks like it's go big or go home still when it comes to NAS.

BTW, as expected i get MUCH better performance wired than wireless.
 
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