Performance

Now the configuration screenshots we have just shown cover like 80% of the units' capabilities and possibilities. You can understand that explaining every little detail would be a tremendous task, and also making it more difficult to understand product. The primary features you have been shown. But now let's have a look at it's performance.

For our test we'll use a WD 150 GB Velociraptor, we'll test only one logical unit. For this test we'll make use of Atto Disk Benchmarking software, which is extraordinary precise when it comes to HDD and SSD performance.

So you'll notice that running the device over USB 2.0 is seriously hindering performance. Read speeds will be roughly 27 to 28 MB/sec (which is still a good 215+ MBit/sec).

But sure, the true power of DAS is that you can bind your storage units through eSATA .. and that virtually means no performance degradation whatsoever until you hit the limits of SATA2 bandwidth.

As a results our WD VelociRaptor HDD was pushing 126 MB/sec on both read and write performance. That's as fast as it can go, truly amazing performance as we maxed out the Velociraptor 100% Should you go RAID then with RAID 5 you'll max out at roughly 200 MB/sec (depending on your choice in HDDs of course).

So yeah, the DAS unit is plenty fast enough and definitely raises the bar compared to NAS units.

Have a peek:

This is why USB 2.0 severely sucks

And this is why eSATA severely rocks - the true power of a DAS unit = FULL SATA2 performance and bandwidth.

Noise levels

The unit as tested is not at all on the noisy side, in fact it is really silent. Once the PWM fan kicks in you can hear a tiny bit of airflow and sure, your HDD will make the actual noise you hear. But the Promise SmartStor DS4600 is a nice and silent unit.

Power consumption

We placed the good old wattage meter in-between the wall power socket and the device to see how much power it actually sucks up. I mean, this is a semi-based controller slash server really.

The DAS is clever in the sense that it will automatically detect when it has been disconnected from a computer and stop the hard drives from spinning. But check it out under active conditions:

Now we did pop in a second drive to look at behavior in power consumption. But the reality is that the Promise SmartStor DS4600 is a very energy efficient device. In idle with on HDD installed we only use up 12 watts, and with that HDD under load in a stress test .. 19 watts.

So yes, it isn't hogging up much energy either.