Hammer myshare Review: Newcomer NAS runs with the dual-drive pack

Performance

The HN1200 was tested in JBOD and RAID 1 (Mirror) modes with 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps LAN connections using our iozone-based test procedure. A summary of average read and write throughput with a gigabit LAN connection can be found in Table 1.

Table 1, HN1200 Average Transfer Rates

For comparison purposes, the charts below, generated with our NAS Chart Performance vs. Filesize tool, show performance from similar dual-drive NAS boxes. The blue line represents performance for the D-Link 323. The green line shows the Synology DS-207, the black line shows the HN1200 and the purple shows the Maxtor Shared Storage II.

As you can see in the following charts, the HN1200 performs pretty well, ending up in the middle of the pack in most cases.

NOTES:

• Firmware version tested was 1.2.0
• Tests were performed with two Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L250S0 drives included with the unit.
• The full testing setup and methodology are described on this page
• To ensure connection at the intended speeds, the iozone test machine and NAS under test were manually moved between a NETGEAR GS108 10/100/1000Mbps switch for gigabit-speed testing and a 10/100 switch for 100 Mbps testing.

Figure 19: 100Mbit Read performance

Figure 20: 100Mbit Write performance

Figure 21: 1000Mbit Read performance

Figure 22: 1000Mbit Write performance

For some real-world perspective, I did a drag-and-drop test, moving files back and forth to the HN1200 with the box in Mirror mode. For 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 4,100 files, using just over a gigabyte.

The results are shown in Table 2 and are somewhat slower than measured with the iozone-based test. This is expected, however, due to the additional overhead incurred by Windows' file copying.

Table 2: HN1200 Windows XP Drag-and-Drop Filecopy times