Performance

The CN-570 has a nice set of capabilities, but how well does it perform? To check it out, tests were run using our standard setup described here. Tests were run both with the device in NAS and USB modes. Although our newly revamped NAS charts allow you to produce your own throughput vs. filesize comparison plots, I've included a few here for your convenience.

As you can see in Figures 15 and 16 below, the network performance of the unit was stacked against similar low-cost BYOD NASes.

Figure 15: Network Read Comparison

Figure 16: Network Write Comparison

The test shows the performance was poor, being near the bottom of the pack in all cases. This is likely partially due to a couple of factors. First, because of its dual-mode connectivity, the disk appears to be connected through the USB bus instead of directly to the IDE subsystem. And secondly, the FAT32 format trades off performance for portability.

When the tests were run with the device in USB mode, you can see much better performance in Figures 17 and 18. In both the read and the write tests, we see a cache-induced performance drop-off when the record size increases, but in both cases, throughput is far above the theoretical maximum one could get on a 100 Mbps network.

Figure 17: USB Read Performance

Figure 18: USB Write Performance

I also did a couple of drag-and-drop file copy tests to see how long it would take to move a directory tree back and forth to the CN-570. In this test, I used my MacBook Pro, 2 GHz Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB of RAM running Windows XP SP2 natively. The directory tree I copied contained 4100 files using just over a gigabyte.

Moving from XP to the CN-570 (write) took (on average) around 10 and a half minutes on a 100 Mbit network and 2 minutes 50 seconds with a USB connection. Moving the same directory back to my XP system (read) one again averaged around 10 and a half minutes on a 100 Mbit network, and one and a half with a USB connection.

CN-570 Windows XP Drag-and-Drop Filecopy times

Tags: BYOD, Coolmax, NAS,

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