Testing (continued):

Real World File Transfers - Small Files:

In the next phase of testing we will look at transfer speeds during real world file transfers. For all tests, the files described were transferred to/from the Windows desktop PC and one of the storage servers while a stopwatch was used to record the duration. Then the file size and the transfer time were used to calculate a transfer rate.

Small files were tested first in this section. Files such as documents, pictures, and digital music probably consist of a large portion of what people would want to back up or share. The small file transfer test involved moving a folder full of MP3 music files between devices. One main folder comprised of 10 sub-folders and a total of 198 MP3 files totaling 643MB was copied and pasted to the storage servers. A reboot of the Windows desktop system was executed between each test, and different folders were used for reading and writing.

The chart below details the results for reading the collection of small files, where we see that the DS1515 performs very well, only getting outperformed by WD's Sentinel DX4200.



Writing these files to the DS1515 was even more impressive, and I duplicated the test a few times since it seemed to provide transfer rates that were too good to be true.