Testing (continued):

Real World File Transfers - Small Files:

Small file transfers were tested next. 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 DX4200 is definitely the fastest device on hand, and while the results were the same for simple and parity, they were even better with mirror. No matter the configuration, we're 20-30MB/s faster than anything else tested for this review.



Results for writing the set of small files to each server are shown below, where we again see that the DX4200 isn't the fastest, but this time it is across all storage layouts. While the write results for the large file under a parity layout seemed bad, I would describe the write results for the small file test as just average for all three layouts on the DX4200.