Icy Box NAS IB-NAS2000

Benchmarks

In order to benchmark the performance of the IB-NAS2000 we will be running two sets of tests. The first will be using a freely available hard disk benchmarking tool named HDTach. This will produce results of the Icy Box using USB against the speed of the hard disk connected directly to the test PC. The second test will be a comparison of the time it takes to copy several files of various sizes (totalling 1.5gb) from the test machine over to the Icy Box using both USB and Network connection methods. The following equipment was used during the testing:

CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6700
Motherboard: Asus P5B-Deluxe (USB2)
Network: 100Mb/s via ZyXel Prestige 650 Router/Hub.
Hard Disk: Maxtor 4D040K2 40GB IDE 5400RPM

As expected, the results obtained from the hard disk installed inside the test PC were much higher than the results from the Icy Box connected via USB. This is primarily down to the internal IDE bus being able to cope with significantly higher throughput than the USB bus. However, to put these results into perspective the Icy Box managed very similar results to those obtained from a ‘Metal Gear’ USB enclosure used in a recent review.

Despite the burst speed of the Icy Box NAS being significantly lower than the Internal IDE speeds in the HDTach tests above, the actual real world difference in transfer speed was less noticeable with only a 20 second disadvantage when using USB over having the disk directly connected via IDE.

Unfortunately the transfer speeds via the network were slightly less impressive, taking just under 7 minutes to transfer the same 1.5gb of files. This could possibly indicate that the Icy Box NAS would benefit from a Gigabit network interface.