Testing (continued):

Atto Disk Benchmark v2.41:

In the final phase of performance testing, I mapped the network storage devices to create drive letters for each on the Windows desktop system. I then ran ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41 in a fairly standard configuration; with a transfer size from 0.5 to 8192KB, a total length of 256MB, and the queue depth at 10. Read and write results are provided in terms of MB/s, and higher is always better. A small sampling of the many results provided in the benchmark is shown in the charts below.

At the lower end of the scale we have 64KB transfers, and the read results are shown below. The DS414Slim bested all of the tested units with a transfer rate of just over 118MB/s.



With 64KB writes, unfortunately the DS414Slim falls to the back of the pack at nearly 56MB/s.



Moving up to the largest of the file transfer sizes used in ATTO's benchmark, we have results for 8192KB (8MB) file transfers. The read results are shown below, here the DS414Slim is only bested by the DS415+ and records almost 117MB/s read rate.



The final result to consider is for 8192KB (8MB) writes. Again the write speeds drop this unit to the back of the pack at almost 57MB/s.



Other testing performed was done streaming various DVD rips to different devices throughout the home. Using WDTV Live, Windows, Android and a Fire Stick I tested the overall performance accessing the movies. I installed Plex on the DS414Slim; the installation while straightforward did take quite some time to get completely configured. This seemed to really max out the poor little CPU on the unit. But once the set up was complete and Meta data was downloaded things returned to normal.

My first test was installing Plex on the Fire Stick. While the browsing of my movies was great, playback was not possible. The Fire Stick does not natively support MPEG and the DS414Slim is not powerful enough to transcode. So if you select any of these streams you get an error message. You can get around this by installing Kodi on the Fire Stick, this will give you playback of MPEG streams but since this is a wireless only device and was relatively far from my router it did occasionally buffer. This was the only glitch I ran into for playback. Otherwise browsing was super-fast and playback started quickly, even with more than one stream active.