Performance
The Personal Cloud was tested with 4.1.5.13 firmware using our Revision 5 NAS test process. The test used the single 5 TB ST5000DM000 review sample as supplied.
We get our first indication of how a NAS is going to stack up by filtering the default NAS chart for the number of drives (1) and looking to see where the NAS currently being reviewed appears. Below I've shown both File Copy Write Performance and File Copy Read Performance for single drive NASes. While the Seagate Personal Cloud is on the lower end of the list, it has much improved performance over its predecessor the Seagate Central.
The 52 MB/s Read performance was just over half that of the top position Synology DS115j, but nearly double that of the Central. Write performance the Personal Cloud came within about 50% of the top performer, while more than doubling its predecessor. The interesting note here is that the DS115j outperforms the PC using an 800 MHz version of the same Marvell SoC vs. the PC's 1.2 GHz and has half the PC's RAM.
Single drive NASes - File Copy Write and File Copy Read Performance
Detailed results are shown below in the Benchmark Summary. Numbers were fairly consistent across all benchmarks showing stable, yet not particularly fast performance.
Seagate Personal Cloud Benchmark Summary
Performance Ranking
There are only two single-drive NASes tested with the current NAS test process, so the NAS Ranker shows only the Personal Cloud and aforementioned Synology DS115j. The File Copy Performance mentioned above is a good indicator of the PC's overall performance. The Ranker Performance Summary details below show it beat the Synology only in the Backup benchmarks.
NoRAID NAS Ranking
Closing Thoughts
The Seagate Personal Cloud should be very attractive to the home user who wants centralized storage with simple setup, wide selection of backup options, flexible media serving and the ability to easily grab files when away from home. It may not have the performance or larger list of features of its proud-to-be-called-a-NAS competitors. But it's perfectly fine as a no-nonsense NAS for someone like my retired parents, who like their technology simple and to just work.