ASRock Rack C2750D4I and U-NAS NSC-800: A DIY File Server
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 2015 8:45 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- storage server
- Avoton
- ASRock Rack
- U-NAS
Performance Metrics - Storage Subsystem
In the previous section, we looked at various benchmarks for databases, web servers, general memory and CPU performance etc. For a file server, the storage performance is of paramount importance, since the main expectation from the system is one of writing to and reading from a disk volume protected against disk failure. In this section, we use Ubuntu 14.04 and mdadm to configure the disks in the hot-swap drive bays in a RAID-5 volume. Selected benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite are run with the RAID-5 volume as the target disk.
AIO Stress
Our first test in the storage benchmark is the AIO Stress PTS test profile. It is an asynchronous I/O benchmark, and our configuration tests random writes to a 2048MB test file using a 64KB record size, enabling apples-to-apples comparison with the other results reported to OpenBenchmarking.org
FS-Mark
FS-Mark is used to evaluate the performance of a system's file-system. The benchmark involves determination of the rate of processing files in a given volume. Different test profiles are used - processing 1000 files of 1MB each, processing 5000 files of 1MB each using four threads, processing 4000 files of 1MB each spread over 32 sub-directories and finally, 1000 files of 1MB each without using sync operations to the disk. The processing efficiencies are recorded in the graphs below.
PostMark
This benchmark simulates small-file testing similar to the tasks endured by web and mail servers. This test profile performs 25,000 transactions with 500 files simultaneously with the file sizes ranging between 5 and 512 kilobytes.
Numbers from the evaluation of other systems can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org
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damianrobertjones - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Any chance of adding the price to the top of the page? I can then evaluate suitability etc.SirGCal - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
I saw it a few times throughout the article including the top page. $845colinstu - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
What's with the benchmarks that aren't compared to anything else?ganeshts - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
This is the first of three file servers that we are reviewing with a completely new evaluation methodology. Since we are just starting out, there are no comparison numbers, but I do link to OpenBenchmarking.org pages for each of the tests - so one can see what other systems are capable of with respect to that benchmark.DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
I think U-NAS deserves more credit for the compactness of their case designs. Being much bulkier than units from Synology/etc has always been an issue for anyone in a space constrained situation (or just with a spouse who grumbles about how much space all of your toys takes up). This case is only 15% larger in volume than Synologies DS1815+ (12.4 vs 14.4 liters); and their 4 bay model comes even closer to the DS414 (7.8 vs 8.7l).Assuming I decide on a DIY box to replace my WHS2011 box in a few months, the U-NAS NSC-400 is exactly what I'm looking for in a chassis (and half the size of the box it'd be replacing).
xicaque - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
I have built two of these units. I am very happy with them. for 200bucks (case only with some wires) is not a bad deal. I am running freenas.DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Do you have any power consumption numbers available?Johnmcl7 - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
There are some power figures on the last page, 70W under load and 38W idle.DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
two numbers in the text is a far cry from the normal table showing rebuild times and power levels shown in a normal NAS review.ganeshts - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Dan, Yes, it felt a bit odd for me to leave out that table in a NAS review.. The issue for me is that it is not worth it to spend more than 'N' hours on evaluating a particular system / review a particular product, and setting up the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmarks and processing it took a lot of time.I hope to address this issue in future file server reviews (now that SPEC SFS 2014 seems to be stable), but not for the next two (which have already been evaluated and are just pending write-up)