QNAP TS-119PII with Mac OSX File Transfer Performance Report

After moving from Edge 72z running OpenSuSE to Mac mini (Late 2012) with OSX, I have a chance to compare NAS with different clients. It is interested to know which one is faster.

QNAP TS-119PII

TS-119PII uses a 2.0GHz Marvell 88F6282 which is a single core ARMv5TE-compliant 32-bit processor with 256K L2 cache.

It comes with 512MB RAM and is not upgradable.

I install a single Seagate Barracuda Desktop HDD 500GB in it.

QTS 4.2.1 Build 0217 for TS-119PII is a 32-bit Linux used in this test.

Mac Mini Late 2012

I have upgrade my Mac mini to 16GB RAM and use a Seagate Laptop SSHD 1 TB which spins at 5400rpm and comes with 8GB MLC cache build-in to replace the slow hard drive.

Test Method

It is detail explained in Prepare Your NAS File Transfer Performance Test with Mac OSX Client. I test both Samba and NFS.

I also add test results from Edge 72z running OpenSuSE with different hard drives in orange color as reference.

1. QNAP TS-119PII File Transfer Performance Report
2. QNAP TS-119PII with Seagate Laptop SSHD and Kingston V+100 SSD File Transfer Performance Report
3. QNAP TS-119PII with OCZ SSD Performance Report

Performance

File transfer performance on QNAP TDS-119PII with Mac OSX via Samba.

File transfer performance on QNAP TDS-119PII with Mac OSX via NFS.

Analyze

In OSX, file transfer is almost identical using Finder or mount in terminal on reading/writing via Samba and NFS.

You may see huge difference compared to reference data. I think it is because of different hard drives and OSX‘s poor support for Samba.

Edge 72z is using Seagate Desktop SSHD 1GB which is faster (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) and has higher disk density (1 disk for 1TB vs 500GB). According to UserBenchmark: SeagateST1000LM014 vs SeagateST1000DX001, Desktop SSHD 1GB is about 43% faster than Laptop SSHD 1 TB.

According to How to speed up SMB connection between a Mac client and Isilon storage server? on ServerFault, it seems Samba is slow with OSX. Although OS X Lion (10.7) begin to support SMB 2.0, not much help on throughput.

More Thoughts

I preferred to use NFS over Samba to share files between OS X and Linux because it is faster. For better performance on OSX, stay with NFS.

Reference

1. Apple: Mac Developer Library: BSD System Manager’s Manual MOUNT(8)
2. Apple: Mac mini (Late 2012) – Technical Specifications
3. Apple: OS X
4. Apple: Support: Mac Basics: The Finder organizes all of your files
5. Lenovo: ThinkCentre Edge 72z
6. Linux.org
7. Marvell: Marvell 88F6282 SoC
8. OpenSuSE
9. Prepare Your NAS File Transfer Performance Test with Mac OSX Client
10. QNAP
11. QNAP: QTS
12. QNAP TS-119PII
13. QNAP TS-119PII File Transfer Performance Report
14. QNAP TS-119PII with OCZ SSD Performance Report
15. QNAP TS-119PII with Seagate Laptop SSHD and Kingston V+100 SSD File Transfer Performance Report
16. Seagate Barracuda Desktop Datasheet
17. Seagate Desktop SSHD Datasheet
18. Seagate Laptop SSHD Datasheet
19. ServerFault: How to speed up SMB connection between a Mac client and Isilon storage server?
20. UserBenchmark: SeagateST1000LM014 vs SeagateST1000DX001
21. Wiki: ARM architecture
22. Wiki: Multi-level cell
23. Wiki: Network File System
24. Wiki: Mac OS X Lion
25. Wiki: Samba (software)
26. Wiki: Server Message Block: 2.1 SMB 2.0
27. Wiki: Terminal (OS X)