Thecus N2050 Evaluations and Benchmarks

Linux

NTFS-3g

Linux bonnie++ NTFS-3g benchmark

This benchmark is probably slowed down slightly by NTFS-3g. See also [1]

Hardware

• HDD: 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 16MB SATA II (ST3320620AS) in RAID1 mode
• RAM: 2 GB DDR2-667
• PCI eSATA Controller Silicon Image SiI 3512 (included with N2050)
• MSI P965 Neo mainboard, E6600 Core 2 Duo CPU 2,4Ghz

Software

• Fedora 8 Linux, 2.6.24.4-64.fc8 kernel (32bit), noirqdebug kernel option (mainboard requires it with kernel 2.6.24.*)
• NTFS-3g 1.1120-1
• one big NTFS partition on the RAID1
• bonnie++ 1.03 as benchmark. 4 GB test data size. command line: $ bonnie++ -s 4096 -r 2048 -f -m "N2050 NTFS-3g eSATA RAID1"

Results

		Sequential Output						Sequential Input				Random Seeks			Sequential Create						Random Create
	Size:Chunk Size	Per Char		Block		Rewrite		Per Char		Block				Num Files	Create		Read		Delete		Create		Read		Delete
		K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	K/sec	% CPU	/ sec	% CPU		/ sec	% CPU	/ sec	% CPU	/ sec	% CPU	/ sec	% CPU	/ sec	% CPU	/ sec	% CPU
N2050 NTFS-3g eSATA RAID1	4G			41441	7	19134	5			62917	8	131.3	0	16	3862	9	22468	11	6914	8	5792	15	26482	14	6964	7
NTFS-3g ST3500630AS	4G			40323	7	17714	5			51068	6	136.2	0	16	3377	9	19337	11	5489	6	5372	14	22697	12	7210	7

The row labelled ST3500630AS is for comparison. It's a single drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB 16MB SATA II) directly connected to the Intel ICH8.

hdparm "hdparm -t"

• RAID1: Timing buffered disk reads: 224 MB in 3.00 seconds = 74.56 MB/sec
• 500GB internal: Timing buffered disk reads: 206 MB in 3.00 seconds = 68.61 MB/sec

Notes

The numbers look good. The N2050 doesn't disappoint.

FWIW, during the first run i got an error:

...
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...Can't delete file F6u0000403
Cleaning up test directory after error.
Bonnie: drastic I/O error (rmdir): File exists

That's not very reassuring... However, this ntfs-3g bug seems to have been fixed in more recent versions: [2] --Sn 13:29, 4 April 2008 (CEST)