Synology DiskStation DS918+ 4-bay NAS Review

Intel’s NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit ) is a benchmark tool designed to enable direct measurement of 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 an 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 writes 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 (aprrox 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files.

In the video tests of Intel's NASPT benchmark, the DS918+ showed strong performance breaking the 100MB/s mark for all tests with one notable exception. The fly in the ointment was the performance while in RAID 10 mode for the HD Video Playback test where the performance fell off a cliff at 30.9MB/s.

In the office tests, the DS918+ displayed strong performance with a pretty good level of consistency across the arrays. It averaged 69.86MB/s for the Office Productivity test, 15.21MB/s for the Content Creation test and 47.32MB/s when dealing with the multitude of small files that make up the Photo Album test.

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