Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
When it comes to delivering files, the N5550 is no slouch. To benchmark the NAS, we run synthetic benchmarks as well as benchmark some real world activities. Testing is conducted by configuring the N5550 in RAID 5 with all drive bays populated.
N5550
- 5 x HDS5C3020ala632 2TB SATA 6.0Gb/s HDDs in RAID 5
- Single Network Interface (Gigabit)
Bench rig:
- Gigabyte 880GA-UD3H
- AMD Phenom II X4 965
- 2x2GB Patriot Sector 5 PC3-12800
- ADATA s511 120GB SDD
- Lian Li PC-6 (click to read our review)
- BFG LS-450
- Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
For testing the large file transfer speed of the NAS, we transfer a 46.6GB Blu-Ray ISO (Avatar) from the workstation to the NAS and back five times. We pipe the transfer speeds during the benchmark to a .csv file for charting. For more on our Avatar Benchmark please see our Benchmarking application: COD Benchmarking Utility
The N5550 performs well when compared to the other 5 bay devices we have tested, trailing only the QNAP TS-559 PRO II (review coming soon), which costs nearly twice as much, by a hair.
For testing the transfer speed of the NAS with smaller files, we use the same method as the Avatar test but instead create two hundred individual MP3’s of specific file sizes for repeatable results. The files are copied from the workstation to the NAS and back 5 times. We pipe the transfer speeds during the benchmark to a .csv file for charting.
This benchmark indicates that the N5550 is the fastest NAS tested so far when it comes to transferring a large number of smaller files, beating out all other 5 bay NAS tested with ease.
