The interest of Gigabit
If you are not yet equipped with Gigabit network material, this may convince you to make the investment.
The theoretical maximum of a 100 Mbps network is as high as 12.5 MB/s. The DS508 comes close to 10 MB/s which is an excellent result.
Gigabit: the interest of jumbo frames
For more information on jumbo frames, don’t hesitate to take a look at our
previous NAS article.
We already saw similar behavior with the N5200BR Pro: the activation of jumbos frames strangely leads to a reduction in performances!
Additional USB and eSATA storage
Besides a printer, speakers or even an IPod, USB ports can take hard drives formatted in Ext3, Fat32 or NTFS (in reading only for the last). An eSATA connection also makes an appearance on the DS508 while Synology formerly reserved this only – and curiously enough –for its one and two bay NAS.
Unsurprisingly, the eSATA enables obtaining the best performances with speeds in writing close to 30 MB/s and surpassing 35 MB/s in reading! Thecus’ N5200BR Pro falls behind even if it still has the advantage in writing. USB results are intriguing with a sustained speed that was lower in reading than in writing.
On the other hand, we saw that the writing of small files is much better on USB/eSATA drives than with a Raid 5 storage. It strongly confirms that the poor performances of Synology NAS in this domain are related to a weakness in Raid support.
