Performance

Performance

Now the screenshots we have just shown barely cover 50% of the units' capabilities and possibilities. You can understand that explaining everything 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.

We'll do our performance tests fairly simple, as ... well, performance is just really good. The QNAP TS-439 Turbo NAS unit is hooked up through a Gigabit Ethernet connection towards a Gigabit switch here in the office, accessible by several clients (PCs).

For the first test we'll use drive 2 inserted into he QNAP unit. This is a WD 150 GB Velociraptor, we'll test only one logical unit no RAID. The tests are as good as you can expect of file-transfers over the Ethernet. In fact, they even were better than I originally expected. The client PC we used also has this very same VelociRaptor HDD.

Let's have a look what happens when we copy a 1GB file back and forth.

I personally feel that an FTP transfer is the most realistic performance measurement and as you can see we reached 67 MB/sec read performance and a 42 MB/s write performance.

A windows copy was showing fairly similar performance and a download through the web server apparently was even faster at 84  MB/sec read speed. Write we could not measure. If you keep that last one in mind and think of internet speeds, that would boil down to a 648 MBit/s download ;)

RAID performance then. Now for the single HDD test as shown above I used a WD Velociraptor. I do not have 4 of these lying around though ;) For our RAID test I was limited to using up-to four 80 GB Seagate drives, obviously much slower than that WD drive, especially in terms of overall write performance. The results shown below are based on FTP file transfers of one Gigabyte.

So obviously HDD performance will be tied completely to performance level of you HDD units. We do seem to stumble into a performance bottleneck once we reach roughly 70~80 MB/sec. Suffice to say, it is as good as you may expect from Gigabit Ethernet performance and a unit with an Atom processor.

Noise levels
The unit as tested is very silent. Initially I was wondering about a high pitch noise coming from the unit, but that turned out to be the Seagate 80GB HDD making the noise. If we remove the drives we barely reach 35 DBa at 75 CM, which is roughly the background noise the city I live in creates all by itself. So the QNAP TS-439 Turbo NAS is as silent as can be.

Obviously the noise makers would be the HDDs you insert into the units. These can make a lot of noise.

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 eats up. I mean, this is a full fetched server really. Luckily it's powered by a very efficient 4-watt Atom processor.

Now as you can see expect roughly anything in-between 30 or 40 Watts, this was with 2 HDDs installed. Obviously if you go extreme, file-copying, server activities etc. all at once, load might go up a little more but we think it's save to say the product would completely max out at 40-45 Watts.

For each additional HDD you should add roughly 5~10 Watts. Overall we feel this is a very reasonable number making it a very power friendly device. It surely beats a dedicated file-server.