QNAP TVS-863+ 8-Bay NAS Review

Multi-Client SMB Performance

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Our SMB multiclient test represents years of hard work, a lot of money and several companies coming together to make the test a reality. There are 10 dual Xeon servers, each with two Hot Lava Shasta 6-port NICs. Each server has 12 Windows 7 Hyper-V installations and each Virtual Machine has a dedicated gigabit Ethernet connection back to a series of linked enterprise network switches. The Windows 7 VMs run custom software that runs Microsoft Office traces with programs like Excel, Access, Word and Power Point.

In high-client count environments, the sequential data is randomized because so much data is reaching the system at one time. With a low number of clients, the sequential data stays sequential but the block size of the file updates is still very small since we are dealing with Microsoft Office files.

This is the first test where we really start to see the AMD APU have issues with performance compared to the other products in the charts. The first chart shows throughput and it takes the SSD cache to bring the TVS-863+ performance to the same level as the Netgear ReadyNAS 716X. We've run this test on a large number of QNAP devices over the years with various Intel processors, and this is the first system that performed so poorly on this specific test.

The second chart shows the average latency for each client. This test is actually more important than the first as it has a direct relationship to the user experience at each office desktop. If you plan to use the TVS-863+ with several users running office software off of the central storage, you will want to take advantage of the SSD cache option.