Performance
As I have mentioned, moving large amounts of data was ohh so slow with the N2100, as it is actually limited to 100 speeds rather than 1000 (Gigabit). To date the fastest upload speed I have been able to achieve was 13MB/s when moving a 1GB file. Interestingly, when downloading the same file the transfer rate never exceeded 7.5MB/s. The same test was run under both Windows XP and Vista systems, both produced the same results.
The above results were recorded in SiSoft2007 and as you can see the network performance of the N2100 is quite poor when compared to our Test System. In fact, even the 22.5MB/s offered by the Test System is not all that impressive given the fact that a gigabit network can work a lot faster, as can the Serial ATA hard drive. Nevertheless, a throughput of 22.5MB/s is a hell of a lot more impressive than 8MB/s. The average latency was recorded to be much the same for both the Test System and N2100.
By drive mapping the N2100 we were able to run some file system tests in SiSoft2007 and the results are interesting. Despite being limited to 8MB/s in the network test, this file system test claims the N2100 sustained a transfer rate of 20MB/s. However, the Test System was again much faster delivering 3x more performance. The Test System random access time was also much faster when compared to the N2100.
When moving large amounts of smaller files such as images (100KB ~ 1MB), the N2100 was very good working at full speed (13MB/s) and I found little to no difference between transferring lots of small files compared to one large file. When two users access the same file at once the maximum transfer rate is almost halved. So while a single user can copy a 1GB file at 7.5MB/s, two users were limited to a shared bandwidth of 9MB/s, roughly 4.5MB/s each. Adding more users reduces the bandwidth even further, so the N2100 is not ideal for heavy access.