NAS performance using SSD caching

[Dennis Wood]

There were a few questions regarding SSD caching and NAS floating around the forum. Here's Qnap's TS-470 Pro over 10 GbE with and without SSD caching. I purposefully used three older Barricuda 7200.11 series drives (sata 3) in a Raid 5 array, with the final TS-470 slot taken up by an Intel 530 SSD drive..around 450 MB/s read/write.

 

[L&LD]

I don't see any performance numbers? Are there more images coming?

 

[Dennis Wood]

sorry about that..Tim fixed up the IMG tag..so you should see images now

 

[L&LD]

Dennis,

Is there any way to increase performance over 1GB Ethernet with the Qnap SSD caching feature?

I am hitting the limit of 113MB/s copying to an SSD based i5 Ivy Bridge system (NUC).

Any hints to make this little setup faster?


Also: how did you get NASPT to run on Windows 8.1? I can't even get it to download from MS' website.

 

[Dennis Wood]

113 is pretty good over 1GbE. In my blog post, links and tips to get NASPT to run correctly: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanw...be-network-newbie-part-2-test-toolkit?start=1

As some slightly older SSDs (like the Samsung 840) have write speeds in the mid 100MB/s range, use Ramdisks on both systems if you can for testing. Check the links and download the free Softperfect Ramdisk: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanw...f-a-10-gbe-network-newbie-part-2-test-toolkit
You can share the ram disks just like any other share, then copy/paste files between them for a quick check. Ramdisks on both host and target will take disk performance out of the equation.

Some antivirus like Bitdefender can really kill network performance if not set up correctly. The free version has no configuration options, so will really affect network speeds.

Post back with your results You can also enable jumbo frames on both host and target, making sure your switch supports them. By default most switches have this turned off.

Cheers,
Dennis.