Testing (continued):

Real World File Transfers - Small Files:

Small files are up next in this round of testing. 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 around the network. 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 of interest. 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 DS415play performs exactly as well as the Thecus N2310, which is about 7MB/s slower than the DS414j.



Writing the set of small files was also not the strong suit of the DS415play. I repeated these tests a few times trying to see if it was a fluke, but it never got any better.



The results from the large file transfer testing was incredibly impressive with the D415play, while the small file testing was not quite so appealing. A device like the DS415play and its special video transcoding features are an excellent candidate for streaming movies, and I am convinced that it could do a great job streaming multiple HD video streams at once based on these test results. Even at about 35MB/s for small file transfers, that is still fast enough to get the typical @4MB MP3 file transferred in its entirety to your PC / media player in a fraction of a second, or to stream it at full quality without impact.