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Intel’s NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit) is a benchmark tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage (NAS) performance. NASPT uses a set of real world workload traces (high definition video playback and recording, video rendering/content creation and office productivity) gathered from typical digital home applications to emulate the behaviour of an actual application.
We’ve used some of the video and office apps results to highlight a NAS device’s performance.
HD Video Playback
This trace represents the playback of a 1.3GB HD video file at 720p using Windows Media Player. The files are accessed sequentially with 256kB user level reads.
4x HD Playback
This trace is built from four copies of the Video Playback test with around 11% sequential accesses.
HD Video Record
Trace writes an 720p MPEG-2 video file to the NAS. The single 1.6GB file is written sequentially using 256kB accesses.
HD Playback and Record
Tests the NAS with simultaneous reads and writes of a 1GB HD Video file in the 720p format.
Content Creation
This trace simulates the creation of a video file using both video and photo editing software using a mix of file types and sizes. 90% of the operations are writes to the NAS with around 40% of these being sequential.
Office Productivity
A trace of typical workday operations. 2.8GB of data made up of 600 files of varying lengths is divided equally between read and writes. 80% of the accesses are sequential.
Photo Album
This simulates the opening and viewing of 169 photos (approx 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files.
During the 10GbE test runs, something very odd was happening in the HD Video Playback test while the disks were in a RAID 6 array, as the performance dropped off completely. The same thing happened in the 4x HD Playback test where it was with both RAID 6 and RAID 1 configurations where the performance dropped off dramatically, something we still are scratching our heads about.
When it came to the office parts of the NASPT benchmark, the Content Creation and Office Productivity tests saw the 10GbE link results open up a clear lead. However, when it came to the Photo Album test, apart from the RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays, the results were much closer and more varied between the two connection speeds when the drives were dealing with the myriad of small files that make up the test.
