I used IOzone to give the Office a performance workout. The full testing setup and methodology are described on this page, so I'll just concentrate on the results here. I should note that, thanks to IOzone's current maintainer Don Capps, I'm somewhat savvier than I was for my ioGEAR BOSS vs. Tritton ASAP review about how to use IOzone properly!

Figure 4 shows a 3D surface plot of the Office's NDAS (Ethernet-connected) write performance using file sizes from 64 kByte to 1GByte and record sizes from 4 kByte to 16MByte. Note that the plot is oriented so that larger file sizes are closer to the front.

Figure 4: Write performance - NDAS mode
(click on the image for a larger view)

This time I know that the "mountain" rising out of the plot's plateau is due to cacheing in the Win XP test system and Office's hard drive 8MB buffer. You can see that small record sizes hold back performance, with peak 496,000 kBytes/sec speed obtained using a 128 kByte record size and 8MByte file size.

NOTE! The flat spots at the left front and right rear of the plot are zero value areas due to the IOzone test parameters that I set and not due to performance problems.

Since the cached performance expands the scale such that you can't see the hardware-limited performance details, I've generated a second plot that zeroes in on that area.

Figure 5: Write performance detail - NDAS mode
(click on the image for a larger view)

Figure 5 shows Write Transfer Speed vs. Record size for file sizes from 32MByte to 1GByte. IOzone's rule of thumb for seeing non-cached performance is to look at results for file sizes greater than the amount of RAM in the system running IOzone (504MB in this case). But Figure 5 shows non-cached performance kicking in even with a 32MByte file size. Even though the non-cached performance comes in around 7700 kBytes/sec, that's not bad given that the max raw data rate for 100Mbps Ethernet is 12500 kBytes/sec.