Page 7 - Performance and Power Consumption
For our tests, the QNAP HS-210 is connected to our central home network with CAT5e wiring. Our test station is located two stories away from the NAS to simulate real world performance in a centralized networking environment. One Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB was installed in the HS-210 for the purpose of benchmarking. The client computer is configured with the following specifications:
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.50GHz
CPU Cooling: Thermaltake WATER2.0 Pro (Noctua NF-F12)
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution
RAM: Kingston HyperX Beast KHX21C11T3K2/16X 4x8GB
Graphics: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2GB OC
Chassis: Lian Li PC-B12
Storage: OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB; Western Digital Caviar Blue AAKS 500GB
Power: PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III 1200W
Sound: Auzentech X-Fi Bravura
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 SP1
Equipped with the Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB, our QNAP HS-210 is ready to roll. According to the engineers at QNAP, and proven to be true in our performance benchmarks, Intel Gigabit LAN adapters -- at least on the client side -- perform much better than their Realtek and Marvell counterparts. Therefore, to prevent any bottlenecks on the client side, our ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard is connected to the network via its integrated Intel 82574L Gigabit LAN adapter. We also conducted the above test on our OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB solid state drive on the client side to ensure there is nothing limiting the performance of our QNAP HS-210 than the NAS itself. In turn, the results were pretty decent for a system of this caliber, especially for a slim and compact home system. Obviously, we did not expect QNAP TS-470 levels of performance, which is significantly more expensive. As you can see in our graphs above, the QNAP HS-210 is capable of doing 48.93MB/s for write and 92.94MB/s for read. Neither figures are terrible, but if it can crack 60MB/s in write for this test, it would have been more in line with other compact systems.
ATTO disk benchmark provides valuable insight into evaluating disk performance; it is especially valuable since it is not local disk limited like Windows file copy -- but rather the network adapter itself. After first using it in our QNAP TS-559 Pro+ review four years ago, ATTO has been an integral part of our storage benchmarks; used in everything ranging from USB flash drives to solid state disks. Venturing in the area of 108MB/s in read and 71MB/s write for pretty much everything 64K and up, remember that the theoretical maximum of Gigabit Ethernet is 'only' 125MB/s (1000Mbps / 8) with overhead -- this is again pretty good. I am actually quite impressed by the read curve, but a little boost in write speed would have been nice.
With one Seagate NAS hard drive installed, power consumption for our specific configuration is at an excellent 10W idling and 13W under load. Power consumption will drop even further if the hard drives are configured to turn off if they are not used. All in all, the QNAP HS-210 is very a power efficient network attached storage. Considering it is going to be running 24/7, every watt will definitely add up! I think QNAP has done a brilliant job in this regard; creating a system that does not generate a lot of heat, allowing it to be completely fanless.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look - Hardware (External)
3. A Closer Look - Hardware (Internal)
4. Configuration and User Interface, Part I
5. Configuration and User Interface, Part II
6. Configuration and User Interface, Part III
7. Performance and Power Consumption
8. Conclusion
