Asustor AS7008T 8-bay Intel Haswell SMB NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 30, 2014 5:05 PM ESTSingle Client Performance - CIFS and NFS on Linux
A CentOS 6.2 virtual machine was used to evaluate NFS and CIFS performance of the NAS when accessed from a Linux client. We chose IOZone as the benchmark for this case. In order to standardize the testing across multiple NAS units, we mount the CIFS and NFS shares during startup with the following /etc/fstab entries.
//<NAS_IP>/PATH_TO_SMB_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER cifs rw,username=guest,password= 0 0
<NAS_IP>:/PATH_TO_NFS_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER nfs rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2, sec=sys,mountaddr <NAS_IP>,mountvers=3,mountproto=udp,local_lock=none,addr=<NAS_IP> 0 0
The following IOZone command was used to benchmark the CIFS share:
IOZone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT -f /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_CSV.csv
IOZone provides benchmark numbers for a multitude of access scenarios with varying file sizes and record lengths. Some of these are very susceptible to caching effects on the client side. This is evident in some of the graphs in the gallery below.
Readers interested in the hard numbers can refer to the CSV program output here.
The NFS share was also benchmarked in a similar manner with the following command:
IOZone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /nfs_test_mount/ -f /nfs_test_mount/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_NFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_NFS_CSV.csv
The IOZone CSV output can be found here for those interested in the exact numbers.
A summary of the bandwidth numbers for various tests averaged across all file and record sizes is provided in the table below. As noted previously, some of these numbers are skewed by caching effects. A reference to the actual CSV outputs linked above make the entries affected by this effect obvious.
| Asustor AS7008T - Linux Client Performance (MBps) | ||
| IOZone Test | CIFS | NFS |
| Init Write | 82 | 82 |
| Re-Write | 83 | 81 |
| Read | 46 | 122 |
| Re-Read | 48 | 122 |
| Random Read | 27 | 56 |
| Random Write | 82 | 78 |
| Backward Read | 26 | 44 |
| Record Re-Write | 1690* | 1637* |
| Stride Read | 44 | 104 |
| File Write | 82 | 81 |
| File Re-Write | 84 | 81 |
| File Read | 33 | 90 |
| File Re-Read | 33 | 91 |
| *: Benchmark number skewed due to caching effect | ||
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bernstein - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Holy crap $1500?! subtracting i3-4330, GA-H97N, 2GB RAM, a 2x SATA3 PCIe controller, some usb stick for the os & a psu thats over $1100 just for the case & that custom operating system...to which i can only say: apple would be twice as rich if it had such margins...
tocker - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
We have not had the best run with the Asustor NAS devices - seem to have some bugs they need to sort out - We have found that even as backup targets they do bizarre things like stop sharing the folders via CIFS/SMB. (log in and reshare, problem solved)We expect a NAS to run for months/years without issues, and sadly this had not been the case for these units.
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I have to agree. When you build a NAS, it needs to be rock-solid, always on, and always available. Oh, and reliable disks help too. I have a FreeNAS 7 based system in my basement (Rack-mounted, Gigabyte board, Phenom II x 2 processor, 4gb ram, 5x2tb drives in RAID5) and it has been restarted maybe a half dozen times in as many years - most of those being deliberate power-downs for reconfigurations of the hardware (ram upgrades/chassis swap/1 drive replacement & rebuild) and it has been probably the most reliable OS I've ever dealt with.Considering FreeNAS is a free, open source project, I would think that the people at Asustor would be able to come at least as close.
leexgx - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
mine is i7-920 with 8 GB ram not ECC but never had stability issues its both CPU and ram underclocked as well (only 1 of the 3 ram slot works got the mobo for like £40-50 when i was doing folding@home with 3x9800GX2 ) 6 HDDs gets rebooted for updates every so 3-6 months (running 2003 server (the XP x64 based one) the later versions of MS server (vista at the time it was Built so been running for long time) was giving me issues with network performancemrdude - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
>$1500 for an i3 with 2GB of non-ECC RAM and only dual ethernet?That's a steal!
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
No kidding, for $1500.00 it should almost come populated with at least 8x2tb drives.bernstein - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
not almost... at $1500 it has to come with at least 8x3TB, everthing less is just ripping consumers off...Wkstar - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
EMachines came in 1999 and knocked the computer world prices in half. Somebody will come and do the same to NAS.. There prices are crazyKerryl - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Don't throw out your tongue...Asustor seems to be lower-priced in the league of i3 NAS. Over $2000 out there for even lower cpu configuration:http://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-1079-PRO-10-Bay-iSCS...
http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskles...
techticket - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
at the core-i3 QNAP TS-879-PRO-U cost $2000+ from newegg.....