HDD Performance | Noise | Power Consumption

Performance

Now the configuration screenshots we have just shown cover like 80% of the units' capabilities and possibilities. You can understand that explaining everything would be a tremendous task, and also making it more difficult to understand product. The primary features you have been shown. But now let's have a look at it's performance.

We'll do our performance tests fairly simple, as ... well, performance is just really average to good. The Patriot Corza NAS unit is hooked up through a Gigabit Ethernet connection towards a Gigabit switch here in the office, accessible by several clients (PCs).

For the first test we'll use drive 2 inserted into the NAS unit. This is a WD 150 GB Velociraptor, we'll test only one logical unit, no RAID. The tests are as good as you can expect of file-transfers over the Ethernet. This Corza is not a professional device and is fairly low cost. So we did not have a lot of expectations. But the results were better than I originally expected. The client PC we used has A OCZ Vertex drive installed BTW (so that can never be a bottleneck).

Let's have a look what happens when we copy a 1GB file back and forth.

I personally feel that an FTP transfer is the most realistic performance measurement and as you can see we reached 13  MB/sec read performance and a 13 MB/s write performance.

A windows copy was showing fairly similar performance, though after a while we noticed the transfer rate cave in to just under 10 MB/sec.

RAID performance then. Now for the single HDD test as shown above I used a WD Velociraptor. We now insert two of these HDDs. The results shown below are based on FTP file transfers of one Gigabyte.

As you can see, it makes no sense whatsoever to place your devices in RAID. There is clearly a bottleneck inside the device. Initially we suspected that the Corza is connecting to the LAN at 100 Mbps = roughly 12.5 MB/sec. But after checking the switch uplinks, we verified that the device was locked in at advertised gigabit/s connectivity.

Roughly 13 MB/sec (= just over 100 Mbit/s) is the maximum performance of the NAS unit.

Noise levels
The unit as tested is a little on the noisy side. Once the PWM fan kicks in you can expect the same noise level that you are used to from your average PC. The fan therefore is on the noisy side once it kicks in.

Power consumption
We placed the good old wattage meter in-between the wall power socket and the device to see how much power it actually eats up. I mean, this is a full fetched server really. Luckily it's powered by a very efficient 4-watt Atom processor.

Now as you can see expect roughly anything in-between 20 or 30 Watts, this was with 2 HDDs installed.

For each additional HDD you should add roughly 5~10 Watts. Overall we feel this is a very good number making it a very power friendly (green) device. It surely beats a dedicated file-server or leaving your PC on day and night.