Testing (continued):

ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41:

For the final round of performance testing, I mapped each of the network storage server's shares to create drive letters for each on the Windows desktop system. I then ran ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41 to see how each device fared. Read and write results are provided in terms of MB/s, and higher is better. A small sampling of the many results provided are shown in the charts below.

At the lower end of the scale in ATTO we have 64KB transfers, and the read results are shown below. The DX4200 definitely performs well here, and depending on the storage layout chosen the results were between 105MB/s and 109MB/s. Not quite the highest, but close and definitely respectable.



Write testing with 64KB transfers in ATTO shows solid performance from the DX4200 in simple and mirror, but with a parity layout we see that drop off again.



Moving to the largest of the file transfer sizes used in ATTO's benchmark, we have results for 8192KB (8MB) transfers. The read results are shown below, where we see all three layouts of the WD Sentinel DX4200 are capable of surpassing 116MB/s, which tops any other device tested.



The final graph covers the write speeds in ATTO when using 8MB files. Here is another case where the simple and mirror layouts perform quite nicely at over 100MB/s, but the parity layout lags behind at just over 70MB/s. 70MB/s is not terrible, but if you actually had a user base of 25-50 people things might start to get ugly.