QNAP TS-201 review? Is that correct?

[entity00]

I read your review regarding the QNAP NAS server TS-201 and I have a big doubt I'd like to discuss.
In page 6 (testing & performance) the author says:

"In regards to performance, the QNAP Turbo Station TS-201 is a pure speed demon. I found that I was limited more by the hard disk transfer speeds then I was the NAS server itself. In my testing I moved a set of files amounting to 100GB to the NAS server, and then moved them back, and then recorded the average. In the end, the results showed me that Gigabit Ethernet can play a huge role in transfer speed, and for those power users with Jumbo Frame support this could reap huge rewards"

How can HDD's be a limiting factor, considering that the maximum throughput of TS-201 gigabit ethernet port is no more that 16MB/s (even when directly connected to a PC with a cat6 cable) ?? :jawdrop:

Infact I asked QNAP and that's what they told me about the maximum network speed achievable by the unit:

http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/9947/testresultep4.th.png (http://img104.imageshack.us/my.php?image=testresultep4.png)

Could someone please help me to understand?
How can TS-201 be a speed demon, while it's speed is just (slightly less than) average when compared to direct competitors ?

Thanks in advance.
Bye now,
EnTiTy

[Das Capitolin]

Hello:

I'm not so sure that your arguement against the performance is valid, but I would love to discuss it. First, you didn't bother to site any sources, so the data and comparisons you make seem out of thin air. Second, your chart doesn't say anything at all about test conditions and settings or even mention the QNAP TS-201. Third, you seem to have missed the part about Gigabit Ethernet utilizing Jumbo Frame burst. Last but not least, welcome to the Bjorn3d.com forums! We hope to see you back here soon for a follow-up post. Your initial post was very good, but it somehow gives me the impression that you hold a vested interest elsewhere.

[entity00]

I completely don't understand what you say.

First, if you did read my post with attention (did you?), I'm not making any comparison at all.
As I already said, I simply asked QNAP tech support (it was Mr. Dale Chen, you can easily verify that and I guess this is a good source) an easy question:

"What's the maximum throughput the TS-201 can reach in an ideal condition?"

The answer is the graph I attached (source QNAP, already said that before): no more that 16 Mbytes/s. Period.

Secondly, maybe you did miss the Jumbo FS in the graph: values 4047 and 9000 are exactly the figures with Jumbo FS support activated (still 16Mb/s though...).

Lastly, yes, I do have a vested interest: I bought a TS-201 unit just convinced by your article.
I'm simply reporting QNAP point of view, you called the TS-201 a speed demon: let me ask you the very same question regarding a "vested interest"....

I leave you with a fair homework: kindly explain the readers "how HDD's could ever be a limiting factor for the TS-201 throughput, with its network port speed capped at less than 20MB/s".

Hope this "follow-up" post is good enough as well.

[Rafal]

Maybe Victor can elaborate on this :D

[Das Capitolin]

I completely don't understand what you say.

Obviously, and likewise.

The answer is the graph I attached (source QNAP, already said that before): no more that 16 Mbytes/s. Period.
The graph does not indicate what product it represents, and it is not availble from either the QNAP web site or in the data they sent with the unit. This is why I questioned the source.

Lastly, yes, I do have a vested interest: I bought a TS-201 unit just convinced by your article.
I'm simply reporting QNAP point of view, you called the TS-201 a speed demon: let me ask you the very same question regarding a "vested interest"....

I leave you with a fair homework: kindly explain the readers "how HDD's could ever be a limiting factor for the TS-201 throughput, with its network port speed capped at less than 20MB/s".

I am certain that this device is not "capped" as you described. I still move very large 10-20GB files in nearly the same amount of time as it would take to transfer from one drive to another. Additionally, do you have your TS-201 configured in RAID-0 or stand-alone mode?

Once I have the opportunity, I will return to the review and add a benchmark analysis of the network throughput using network benchmarking software. Although I see that you are only after the wording I used to describe speed, I would like to disprove this idea of a "20Mbps Network thoughput cap".

[PP Mguire]

He creates a point. Even though i dont know what this thing is, HD speed is still alot faster than gigabit networking speed even with Jumbo Frame Burst. 16-20mb/s < 80mb/s tbh. My $0.02

[entity00]

My setup is RAID0 (of course offering RAID0 functionality is rather comic when the unit is capped to 16MB/s...)

I'm not after anything. I like website with trustworthy reviews.
What is written in the review is simply disproved by QNAP itself and led me to purchase a product I don't need.

The bottom line is that the author either didn't run any benchmark at all - basing his statements on some kind of "speed feelings" (not really a professional review, personal opinion) - or intentionally intended to "promote" the product.
Both the cases are blameworthy.

By the way, it should be clear for all that TS-210 network throughput cannot be limited by HDD's in any way.

My advice is to correct the review ASAP, in order to limit the number of users kindly misled by it.

[Victor]

entity00, welcome to bjorn3d, and thank you so much for your replies. We are always welcoming to any discussion and criticism, as it would help us to improve.

I believe Olin's statement is meant to be read as that gigabit ethernet offers better performance than normal 100Mbps lan.

Almost any storage device will never filfill the theoretical transfer speed, both the HD and the ehternet. Of course, none of the ethernet can be limited by the HD yet (if we are talking about the theoretical transfer speed of gigabit ethernet, (1000Mbps=128MB/s), compare to the 300MB/s offered by SATA-2 or 150MB/s offered by SATA1). In real life, most HD, can't transfer more than 40~50MB/s).

[entity00]

entity00, welcome to bjorn3d, and thank you so much for your replies. We are always welcoming to any discussion and criticism, as it would help us to improve.

I believe Olin's statement is meant to be read as that gigabit ethernet offers better performance than normal 100Mbps lan.

Almost any storage device will never filfill the theoretical transfer speed, both the HD and the ehternet. Of course, none of the ethernet can be limited by the HD yet (if we are talking about the theoretical transfer speed of gigabit ethernet, (1000Mbps=128MB/s), compare to the 300MB/s offered by SATA-2 or 150MB/s offered by SATA1). In real life, most HD, can't transfer more than 40~50MB/s).
Actually RAID0 systems can sustain 70-80 GB/s constantly, while gigabit network can easily reach 70-80 MB/s constant as well.
That's why I was fooled by the review into thinking that it was true for the QNAP as well.

Please consider that websites like Bjorn3d are powerful, in the sense that can actually influence the end-user purchase decisions.
Posting reviews just "feelings-based" is not professional nor fair.

Regards.

[Kougar]

Howdy Entity!

We do take our reviews here seriously, please do not misunderstand. The entire point behind doing a review is to enable their readers to make better decisions regarding their considered purchases.

While I do not have this device myself, I think that a 16MB/s limitation is not correct. This is extremely slow (And I mean extremely) and would make even common tasks take forever. In comparison even a 4,200RPM notebook drive is a good deal faster than this! Exactly how did you arrive at the conclusion the device is limited to 16MB/s, as I have looked at that chart but it is not clear to me.

A fast RAID 0 is capable of an Average Read speed of about 80-140 MB/s only, not GB/s :) If you are thinking of Burst Speed then that is something else and isn't something that normally occurs in everyday use, Burst Speeds are not really attainable unless both RAIDed drives had filled their entire cache buffers with the exact specificed data before the subsequent READ request was even sent, a sort of "future premonition" event if you will.

Das, perhaps a few HD Tach screenshots can help here? AFAIK it should work just fine with an external drive and will show any sort of bandwidth cap, if present, in the Average sustained read speed. :)

[Das Capitolin]

Hmmm.... benchmarking with HD Tach is easy enough, but is it possible on a mapped network drive? I am yet to ever need it for that, so I am unsure.

At any rate, despite your assertion that QNAP themselves have told you that the product is capped at 16Mbps, I have yet to see what kind of performance you have seen from it. I know with 100% certainty that the throughput I experience is far better then what you have suggested.

So is it performing for you? Because up to this point you haven't given any impression that you have done anything other then purchase the unit. What kind of network are you running? What kind of hard drives, and in which array?

Oh- and I should have mentioned this earlier: I am the author.

[SwedBear]

A 16 MB/s cap would be very odd. Why put in a gigabit port if you cannot even come close to using it?

A regular gigabit network manges around 80 MB/s (had some fun yesterday measuring it with SiSoft Sandra between two machines in my gigabit network). A single SATA 300 HD (in my case Seagate 320 GB) manages around 60-65 MB/s so in that case the HD actually is limiting.

RAID of course speeds things up.

However - as I read Olins text he points to the fact that gigabit ethernet is important for performance compared to a NAS with just a 100 MBit network. And quite obious it is. With a 100 MBit port the NAS would have been severely limited in speed and the HD speed would never enter into the equation.

But, should it be quite easy to check? If I read it correctly Olin you tested and trasfered big files over thenetwork to it and then calculated the average speed. What speeds did you achieve?

Check if you can use the latest SiSoft Sandra XI with its network test to test the drive. I'm not sure if it needs a OS on the other side.

/B

[Das Capitolin]

UPDATE: HDTach will not support mapped network drives. I tried Passmark Performance Test v6.1 to get a relative score, but that program requires that another copy be running on the NAS, which is not possible.

How about this: I move a 1024MB (1GB) file to the NAS and time it. That should be enough to repeat the test I have already conducted.

[Das Capitolin]

OK, I have completed the transfer test on a 100Mb network (have the TS-201 here at a clients office as well as my own, but here it is 10/100 on CAT 5e). A 1,036,826KB file (1012.53MB 0r .99GB) file moved from the TS-201 NAS to a workstation in exactly 1 minute and 45 seconds. This particular NAS operates in single drive mode, not RAID-0 like mine, and the hard drives are 7200RPM 8MB cache onto the same thing in the workstation.

When I get back to my office I will test again using Gigabit ethernet and jumbo frame packets with 10K drives.

[Das Capitolin]

Raptor 10K Single disk+CAT6+Jumbo Frame+1024MB=60 seconds.
Raptor 10K x2 RAID0+CAT6+Jumbo Frame+1024MB=47 seconds.

I will update my review with these results, so that someone else doesn't decide to accuse me of fabricating results again. For the record, I did not think that these were bad times at all for the transfer of a 1GB file.

So your original concern was: "How can HDD's be a limiting factor?"

Well, here's how: These hard drives are not in a PC, they are in a NAS. If they were in a PC then the hard disks would operate with the FAT32 or NTFS file system, but in the NAS they are formatted using it's own file system. Furthermore, since the network waits on the data to be spooled out from the NAS (as evidenced by the fact that Gigabit was faster then 100MB, and RAID0+Gigabit was faster still), then the faster the hard drive the better the performance.

I think that my orginal statement still applies, and is not a false proclamation.

I'm not after anything. I like website with trustworthy reviews.
What is written in the review is simply disproved by QNAP itself and led me to purchase a product I don't need.

What were you expecting from the NAS that suddenly changed your need for it? It still has all of the functions that I indicated, and it is plenty fast.

The bottom line is that the author either didn't run any benchmark at all - basing his statements on some kind of "speed feelings" (not really a professional review, personal opinion) - or intentionally intended to "promote" the product.
Both the cases are blameworthy.

Actually, the real bottom line is that you didn't do a very good job of reading the article. The benchmark which was done was more test then benchmark, and it was detailed in the test methodology. Explain to me what you would have used to benchmark this unit which I have not done. I think you owe me an explaination since you accuse me of not doing any of the work I indicated.

By the way, it should be clear for all that TS-210 network throughput cannot be limited by HDD's in any way.

My advice is to correct the review ASAP, in order to limit the number of users kindly misled by it.

So if I used 5400 RPM hard drives the network throughput would not be limited? I think that it is very CLEAR to any technically informed person that a network appliance could have its throughput affected by the performance of the hard drive.

The review needs no correction. I will gladly add my additional results to the review as an addendum, but otherwise it stands as-is. Now that I have disproved your accusation, I am curious if you don't have vested interests with the competition. ;-)

If you think the TS-201 unit is worthless to you, I would happily purchase it from you for $200. :exactly:

[PP Mguire]

May i might add that theoreticaly speaking SATAII and SATAI has a bus transfer speed of 3 and 1.5gb/s but the HD hardware is still limited itself to 80mb/s. So your SATA bus is <------------------> that big but the HD can still only put out this <-----------> much by limited hardware. Coming from a high up Foxconn employee (my dads friend)

[Kougar]

So, then it really is a 17MB/s cap on it?? Hmm... Ran a few tests with a 1.13gb file and my own network/computer drives. Took over 2 minutes to transfer over the 100mbit network, but only 17 seconds to transfer from one Seagate drive to another on the same system. I guess Entity won this one... So when it's used in a RAID 0 is there actually any improvement at all with the QNAPs, or none at all over a single drive?

Sorry HD Tach didn't work for you Das, I was sure it would for any network accessible drive but I guess I was wrong there as well.

[entity00]

So, then it really is a 17MB/s cap on it?? Hmm... Ran a few tests with a 1.13gb file and my own network/computer drives. Took over 2 minutes to transfer over the 100mbit network, but only 17 seconds to transfer from one Seagate drive to another on the same system. I guess Entity won this one... So when it's used in a RAID 0 is there actually any improvement at all with the QNAPs, or none at all over a single drive?

Sorry HD Tach didn't work for you Das, I was sure it would for any network accessible drive but I guess I was wrong there as well.

Thanks Kougar, I guess I won all the story, but someone is not willing to admit it (not a surprise tho'...).

I ran the same benchmark with:

2 x 5400 HDDs (Samsung)
2 x 7200 HDDs (Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.10)
2 x Raptor 10K

either in RAID1 or RAID0.
I get results varying from 10 to 16 MB/s, independently on the setup.
Exactly as QNAP said.
That's of course because the network port cannot do more than 16-20 MB/s and is (and will remain) the only limiting factor.

But let's say that HDDs are somehow limiting. The bottom line is:

- HDD's throughput impact: 5% (3-4 MB/s of difference changing HDD's, no more than that)
- Network throughput impact: 95% (10-15Mb/s instead of 80-90 MB/s, speed that gigabit transfers should reach)

so in the best scenario you're missing the big picture, focusing on peanuts.

In a nutshell, I'm sorry Das, your advice is simply wrong and misleading: I'd suggest readers either to buy the slowest HDDs they can or another NAS (e.g. the TS-401 as QNAP told me, that can reach 500-600 MBit/s because not network limited).
Spending money on HDD's will just be a total waste.

Lastly, (I didn't want to say that but you forced me, Das) when I pointed QNAP to your review asking clarifications, that's their answer:"You should have used a more balanced review".



P.S.: changing the review like you did is still damn wrong:

In regards to performance, the QNAP Turbo Station TS-201 is a pure speed demon when compared to other NAS devices. I found that I was limited more by the hard disk transfer speeds then I was the NAS server itself, thanks to Gigabit Ethernet

Speed demon: TS-201 is NOT a speed demon, other NAS's can do the very same mileage (did you look at the reviews suggested by QNAP? You'd better do...)
Limited more by HDD's transfer: simply not true
thanks to gigabit ethernet (???) : simply not true
using RAID 0: a complete nonsense. It would mean losing realiability with no trade-off effects anywhere

Who did pose the question of "vested interest" ? Wasn't that you?

I'm warning users on many storage-related forums not to trust this review. Sorry.

Having said that, I think that's all folks.

[Scott]

Ok points have been made here.

I do not want this to turn into a shooting match. If that starts to happen I will close the thread.

Scott

[entity00]

This is not gonna happen from my side.

Provided no idiots insinuate again I have "vested interests" somewhere (other than my unwisely-spent money, of course).
I hereby take all the responsibility for having trusted poor sources (good lesson learnt) and bought something I don't actually need.

EnTiTy

[XJnine]

I might insinuate it just for calling my friend an idiot.

There was no need for that entity00. :evil:

[Rafal]

Cut the crap already my friend. You've made your points and so did Olin.

-CLOSED-

[Das Capitolin]

This is not gonna happen from my side.

Provided no idiots insinuate again I have "vested interests" somewhere (other than my unwisely-spent money, of course). EnTiTy

Your arguements are weakened by name calling. I am not an idiot, and I think that you have overstepped your boundary.