Drobo 5N2 5-Bay Self-Managing NAS Review

Test Methodology & Setup

Most of the hardware for NAS testing isn’t an important factor when it comes to benchmarks, most of it comes down to the network infrastructure. I am using 10 GBASE equipment which means that I should max out any Gigabit Ethernet connections with ease and I got a second port to aggregate with, in case one isn’t enough. The benchmarks will be performed through a 10GBASE managed switch which should give us some great benchmark results.

As part of the testing, the NAS is connected through a D-Link DXS-1210-12TC managed 10GBase switch and then to our test bench to give the best real world setup test that we can and the NAS itself is packed with Western Digital’s 6TB RED NAS drives. Intel’s NASPT software does require us to drop the memory down to 2GB, as using any more would lead to data caching and skew the results.

I will be testing the NAS box performance under each of the RAID options that it has available as well just a single drive. Full volume encryption and shared folder encryption will also be tested whenever possible, to check what impact it has on the performance. Other tests include file format comparisons and iSCSI connections over shared folders. Each of these tests runs five times after which the best of the five results in each category is selected for use in the charts.

Test system:

• Supermicro C7Z97-OCE
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Exceleram EP3001A 2GB PC3-10666
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Sapphire R7 240 2GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer C
• Lian Li PC-T60
• Windows 10 Pro

Disks in Product:

• WD RED NAS 6TB
• Seagate 3TB NAS HDD
• Toshiba 1TB DT01ACA100

Network Setup:

• D-Link DXS-1210-12TC Switch
• D-Link DXE-820T NIC

We would like to thank our sponsors for supplying us with the components needed for the test system as well as drives.

Software used:

With a device of this sort having so many different applications, Intel’s NASPT software covers all the bases and also gives us a set of results that we will be able to utilise and compare those against other similar systems.

Intel NASPT (Network Attached Storage Performance Toolkit) performs its test by transferring varying sizes and quantities of data to and from the device based on twelve different scenarios.