Do It Yourself NAS

StorageNerve has benchmarks for the 4-slot Drobo connected using USB 2.0 and Firewire 800.

George Ou over at ZDNet has RAID benchmarks for various flavors of RAID, based mainly around the RAID10 and the Intel ICH8R RAID controller.

SmallNetBuilder has a list of NAS devices benchmarked by different criteria. A homebuilt Ubuntu NAS device make an appearance in several benchmarks.

X-bit labs benchmarks eleven 160 GB hard drives.

SmallNetBuilder takes a look at the Norco DS-500, a five drive eSATA attached drive enclosure.

Tom’s Hardware benchmarks a couple of 7200 drives in RAID 0 and compares them against the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. For fun they put the Raptor in a RAID 0 array too.

Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.

This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.

X-bit labs benchmarks several different models of 400 GB SATA drives in four drive raid arrays. Tests are done using an Areca ARC1220 RAID controller, probably on Windows.

SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.

SmallNetBuilder has benchmarks of file access to Ubuntu Linux and Clarkconnect over Samba. Included are instructions for setting up the software on both systems, and a guide to the hardware used in the project.

Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder describes their methodes for benchmarking NAS devices with IOzone.