Benchmarks: File Download Performance

Thanks to its Gigabit 2.0Gbps network support, once Link Aggregation is enabled we found that the Synology DS2411+ provided a transfer speed of 181.4MB/s when using eight drives in RAID0. The RAID5 configuration was 9% slower, but even so, a throughput of 165.6MB/s is impressive.

The game copy evaluation is a mixture of small and large, compressed and non-compressed files (1336 files weighing 2.70GB). When working with multiple smaller files the throughput of these devices is well below 100MB/s, rendering Link Aggregation pointless.

The Synology DS1511+ remains the fastest NAS device tested while the DS2411+ was a close second with 58.2MB/s. The cheaper DS411+ wasn't far behind at 53.2MB/s while our Core 2 Duo test system managed just 43.5MB/s.

The program copy test is comprised of many small non-compressed files (6104 files totaling 2.75GB). Again, the small files cripple the performance of these NAS devices. For some reason the DS2411+ was much slower than the DS1511+ even though they were tested with the same hard drives.

Given that the DS2411+ and DS1511+ feature the same amount of RAM and use the same CPU we believe the performance difference comes down to the SATA controller. Whereas the DS1511+ uses Intel's ICH9R southbridge, the DS2411+ relies on third-party Marvell controllers.