Testing:

Testing the Synology DiskStation DS212 involved analyzing two simple criteria; transfer rates and energy efficiency. The published specifications detail that the DS212 is very impressive when it comes to both categories, but for real world results it was tested head-to-head with another NAS holding a set of the same hard drives. A Seagate BlackArmor NAS 400 was equipped with another pair of 3TB Seagate drives and connected to the same network. Both NAS devices were configured in RAID 0 and wired to a router via CAT 6 cables, which was then wired to the host computer via a CAT 6 cable. All network controllers are capable of Gigabit transfers. Data transfers were all timed with a stopwatch and then the file size was divided by the elapsed time to calculate a transfer rate.

Two types of file transfers were conducted - large file and small file - and the read and write results were analyzed. The small file transfers consisted of sending a 4.3GB collection consisting of just over 1000 MP3 files to and from the NAS devices. The large file transfers consisted of sending a single 4.3GB MPG movie file to and from the NAS devices. Synology has published details on similar tests on their website (link), which indicate some fairly impressive transfer rates!

The chart below details the results from the small file transfer tests. These numbers roughly correspond to the small file transfer results presented by Synology, and show that whether reading or writing, the Synology device was able to transfer files about 6x faster than the Seagate device! Speeds in the neighborhood of 50MB/s are definitely impressive for this type of transfer.



The next chart takes a look at the results from the large file transfer tests. While I was not able to get a sustained, average transfer of over 100MB/s, it was pretty close when reading from the DS212. 89.6MB/s is impressive, and I now wonder why I ever thought the Seagate device was quick. While transferring these files I would get instantaneous bursts of over 110MB/s, but they were not sustained over the course of the transfer.