Asustor Drivestor 4 (AS1104T) 4-bay NAS Review

1. Introduction2. Asustor Drivestor 4 / Packaging & bundle3. Asustor Drivestor 4 / Design4. Asustor / ADM5. Usability6. Testing Methodology7. ATTO Disk Benchmark8. Intel NASPT9. Backup & Restore10. Encryption Performance11. Workload Scenarios12. PCMark10 Data Drive Benchmark13. Real Life File Testing14. Power15. Closing Thoughts16. View All Pages

Intel’s NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit ) is a benchmark tool designed to directly measure home network-attached storage (NAS) performance. NASPT uses a set of real-world workload traces (high definition video playback and recording, video rendering/content creation and office productivity) gathered from typical digital home applications to emulate the behaviour of an actual application.

We’ve used some of the video and office apps results to highlight a NAS device’s performance.

HD Video Playback
This trace represents the playback of a 1.3GB HD video file at 720p using Windows Media Player. The files are accessed sequentially with 256kB user-level reads.

4x HD Playback
This trace is built from four copies of the Video Playback test with around 11% sequential accesses.

HD Video Record
Trace writes a 720p MPEG-2 video file to the NAS. The single 1.6GB file is written sequentially using 256kB accesses.

HD Playback and Record
Tests the NAS with simultaneous reads and writes of a 1GB HD Video file in the 720p format.

Content Creation
This trace simulates the creation of a video file using both video and photo editing software using a mix of file types and sizes. 90% of the operations are written to the NAS with around 40% of these being sequential.

Office Productivity
A trace of typical workday operations. 2.8GB of data made up of 600 files of varying lengths is divided equally between read and writes. 80% of the accesses are sequential.

Photo Album
This simulates the opening and viewing of 169 photos (approx 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files.

In the video tests of Intel’s NASPT benchmark, the Drivestor 4 showed strong performance breaking the 100MB/s mark for all tests, with the fastest performance, 198MB/s, coming from the HD Video Playback test trace while the drives were in a RAID 0 array.

In the office tests, the NAS displayed strong performance with a pretty good consistency across the tested arrays. The strongest performance came from the Office Productivity trace with an average of 75.22MB/s. When dealing with the multitude of small files that make up the Photo Album test it averaged 54.42MB/s and the more arduous Content Creation trace produced an average of 17.7MB/s.

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