Calling all NAS users

[Paul B.]

What's your setup and what kind of transfer rates do you get?

[nuclear500]

Going to answer this from an enterprise perspective, as home users don't have NAS devices..


We use 2 NetApp GFiler 825's with back-end Hitachi disk via Fibre (not sure if it is 2 or 4Gb but I want to say 2Gb) in an HA cluster, but each host is separate in file systems they present as well as disk used (spindles might be shared, but I'm not the SAN admin or the netapp admin)

With that said, a copy of the Server 2008 beta 1.8GB ISO to a local 10K SCSI RAID 5 (3 disk) took about 72 seconds, perfmon reported a burst of 38MB/s and an average of around 26MB/s

Doing the same test with the same ISO from a second identical Wintel server at the same time resulted in 30MB/s burst on both servers and an average of 21MB/s on both as well as an 88 second copy time. This was with the same 1.8GB ISO.

NetApp to NetApp via the Windows server averaged roughly the same.

I would highly recommend NetApp for entry level stuff as well. If you do not have a SAN fabric or cannot afford a SAN admin, you can do iSCSI and achieve almost exactly the same performance, given a 1Gb+ backbone and private network.

[kerowo]

The bottle neck is probably going to be your network or the connection to the drive if it is hanging off a NAS device. If you have networked two computers together that transfer rate is probably a good benchmark.

Nuc, home NAS devices are a growning market with most storage manufacturers starting to enter the market. When I was looking at them they all used some non-standard format on the disk which put me off from trying one. I'm not sure if that is still the case or not.