| Article Index |
|---|
| LaCie 2big network Review |
| Specifications |
| External Appearance |
| Basic Functionality |
| Advanced Functionality |
| Performance |
| Is The LaCie 2big for me? |
| Conclusion |
| All Pages |
The LaCie is as solid as hewn marble and has the brushed aluminium body of a premium aircraft; but disk performance is also critical in the NAS world. You buy a new storage device with the looks of a Ferrari, you don't expect the performance of a Yugo.
So how well does the LaCie 2big perform?
The tests use the following two data sets:
Small Files:
- 2144 files, in
- 311 directories, totalling
- 136,417,700 bytes (130.10 MB)
Large Files:
- 27 files, in
- 17 directories, totalling
- 783,609,012 bytes (747.30 MB)
The test client was configured as follows:
- Acer R510 Server (Intel 7320 Chipset)
- 2GB DDR-333 ECC RAM (2 x 1GB dual channel)
- 3.0GHz/800MHz Intel Xeon
- HighPoint RocketRAID 2210 PCI-X card in 64 bit, 133MHz slot
- 3 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives in RAID 5
- Intel Pro/1000 MT Network Connection
- Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64
To understand whether the server itself would be a limit, the dataset was copied from one directory on the server to another on the same disk (a stress test). On the small file set the server averaged 26,930,343 bytes per second, or 1541.0 MB per minute. On the large file set, the server was faster at 64,884,409 bytes per second, or 3712.7 MB per minute.
All tests were conducted five times and the average taken after discarding any results that were obviously different from the rest. Tests using FTP were slower than Windows file/print sharing and thus the Windows results are shown here.
First the results with the LaCie 2big configured with the disks in RAID 0:
| Source | Target | Data Set | Bytes Per Second | Megabytes Per Minute | %age of PC to PC |
| PC | NAS | Small Files | 1,356,840 | 77.6 | 5.0 % |
| PC | NAS | Large Files | 11,226,964 | 642.4 | 17.3 % |
| NAS | PC | Small Files | 1,904,002 | 108.9 | 7.1 % |
| NAS | PC | Large Files | 15,677,214 | 897.1 | 24.2 % |
Stress Test
| Source | Target | Data Set | Bytes Per Second | Megabytes Per Minute | %age of PC to PC |
| NAS | NAS | Small Files | 841,666 | 48.2 | 3.1 % |
| NAS | NAS | Large Files | 6,787,428 | 388.4 | 10.5 % |
The same tests were then repeated after converting the LaCie to use RAID 1. The tests were not conducted until after the device had reported that the synchronisation of the data was completed.
| Source | Target | Data Set | Bytes Per Second | Megabytes Per Minute | %age of PC to PC |
| PC | NAS | Small Files | 1,341,614 | 76.8 |
5.0 % |
| PC | NAS | Large Files | 11,255,925 | 644.1 |
17.3 % |
| NAS | PC | Small Files | 1,855,103 | 106.1 |
6.9 % |
| NAS | PC | Large Files | 15,019,843 | 859.4 |
23.1 % |
Stress Test
| Source | Target | Data Set | Bytes Per Second | Megabytes Per Minute | %age of PC to PC |
| NAS | NAS | Small Files | 880,446 |
50.4 |
3.3 % |
| NAS | NAS | Large Files | 6,196,820 | 354.6 |
9.6 % |
The results are quite disappointing. Despite the 1Gb interface (which tops out at about 120 megabytes per second) the best the LaCie 2big could manage in any test and configuration was just 15MBps - or about 12.5%. In fact, the LaCie would barely be held back if it were only connected to an older 100 Mbps network.
Thanks