According to a recent poll conducted by Fleischman-Hillard and German website Speicherguide.de, direct-attached storage systems (DAS) and RAID-based storage solutions are still the mainstays of medium-sized businesses. However, NAS solutions (Network Attached Storage) offer the easiest path to adding storage to your existing infrastructure in many cases. Regardless of whether you’re integrating a small NAS hard drive or a full-fledged NAS server, all you basically have to do is attach the device to your network and configure it, with no special client-side software needed. However, especially lower-priced NAS devices share one downside, namely rather low performance. With its ShareDisk Gigabit Pro, Co-World aims to change this.

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Most NAS devices employ comparatively simple logic and use one or more hard drives. Dedicated high-performance servers that offer better performance than their SOHO counterparts are usually only found in very large companies and contain a large number of hard drives while offering flexible user management. As simple as using existing TCP/IP infrastructure to add a storage solution is, it does mean a lot of work for the NAS device itself, as it has to translate the data stored in blocks on the hard drive into TCP-segments for NAS operation. Usually, they are large enough to be transported through an IP layer, in most cases via the Internet Protocol (IP), meaning they are 1500 Bytes in size including the header. On top of that, there is the overhead for network traffic including the three-way handshake via TCP. All of these factors require performance, explaining why most simple NAS products don’t exceed a transfer rate of 20 MB/s. For reference, any normal 3.5” hard drive installed in a computer nowadays can reach between 70 MB/s and 100 MB/s, depending on the model.

Speeding up a NAS server thus requires specialized hardware. If you want to create RAID 5 or RAID 6 array with parity information from your hard drives, you’ll need an XOR unit as well to calculate the data redundancy as well. This is the reason why NAS boxes often get so expensive so quickly, even if they already have a comprehensive feature set to begin with.

Co-World, on the other hand, is taking a different approach. Like other NAS devices, the ShareDisk products use network connections to enable client computers to use their storage space, but they use a slim TCP/IP-like protocol that leaves all of the computational tasks to the computers on the other end of the network. Thus, a driver is required in order to use the ShareDisk Gigabit Pro tested here. The results are definitely respectable. No other device that we have ever tested in the Tom’s Hardware labs has been this fast.