Performance testing Windows based NAS devices

Following on from last nights article about Performance Testing of non Windows based NAS devices, tonight, I’ll give you some results of some of the NAS devices that are based on Windows.  As I said last night, this is all about getting a general feel for the performance of these devices vs categorical winners and losers and it’s based on what I happen to have in my lab / production network right now.

Currently I’ve got the following devices in my environment.

• Buffalo TerraStation Pro WSS – this device has 4 x 1TB drives in a Windows software based RAID 5 configuration.  It runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Workgroup Edition.  I did a review of this device here if you are interested
• HP Microserver – this is a Windows NAS device that I built myself.  It has 4 x 2TB drives in it, but I’ve not configured it with any kind of RAID, therefore the testing is based on a single 2TB drive.
• Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 – I’ve got two of these here, one has 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID 5, and the other has 4 x 2TB drives.  My testing is done on the 4 x 3TB unit.  This runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.  There’s a review of this device here.

Here’s the results of my testing

Not sure what I can draw from these results other than they are all pretty similar all in all.

I’m busy testing Windows Servers right now for the next post