Since the mini can be used as an NAS or as a directly-connected USB device, I wanted to see the difference in performance and compare it to other NAS devices that I've tested. For the first run, I checked the networked data read and write performance using the iozone tool as described here.

The test was run under Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop with 384 MB of RAM. How fast a computer can read / write data to a drive depends on many factors that are specific to the system running the test, so this test may not represent the performance you'd see on your own system.

NOTE: The maximum theoretical speed one could expect to see on a 100Mbps network is around 12,000 kBytes/Second, so any values in excess of this are due to caching.

Figure 8: NAS mode Read performance
(click image to enlarge)

The NAS mode read performance shown in Figure 8, shows around 5 kBytes/sec speed for file sizes up to 32MB, dropping off to somewhere in the 3 kByte/sec range for larger file sizes. Figure 9 shows caching effects in the NAS write performance peaking around 200,000 kBytes/sec with a 1MB file size. Note that speed drops dramatically for all file sizes when record sizes are larger than 256 kBytes.

Figure 9: NAS mode Write performance
(click image to enlarge)