ASUSTOR AS-606T Review – Speed Test!

In this post, we will find out how well does the ASUSTOR AS-606T 6 bay NAS perform. Some network performance testing involving copying of large files to and fro the AS-606T will be conducted to determine its read and write speed for CIFS (Windows File Service).

The equipments involved

• ASUSTOR AS-606T with 6 x Western Digital Green hard drives
• iMac 27″ mid-2011
• ASUS RT-AC66U

The network links are not aggregated. Hence, the speed test result is for a single network link.

Both the iMac 27″ and ASUSTOR AS-606T are linked up via the LAN ports on the ASUS RT-AC66U. They are running on 1 Gigabit connection with default MTU. The maximum theoretical limit of a 1 Gigabit connection is 1000 megabits (1000 Mb/s) or 125 megabytes (125 MB/s).

NAS Performance Tester (a free NAS speed testing tool) will be used to test the read and write performance of ASUSTOR AS-606T.

The tests

Two tests were performed for each RAID configurations (6 disks on RAID 5 and  6 disk on RAID 6)

1. First test using a 4000MB file; and
2. Second test using a 2000MB file

For both tests, a network share on AS-606T was mapped as A: on the computer.

The results of AS-606T speed tests

4000 MB file test

In the 4000MB file test, the ASUSTOR AS-606T managed to achieve an average of 104.98 MB/s write and 120.09 MB/s read on RAID 5 configuration.

And for the 4000 MB file test in RAID 6, the ASUSTOR AS-606T managed to achieve an average of 95.42 MB/s write and  115.90 MB/s read.

2000 MB file test

And in the 2000MB file test for RAID 5, the ASUSTOR AS-606T managed to achieve an average 107.02 MB/s write and 115.24 MB/s read.

For RAID 6, the ASUSTOR AS-606T managed to achieve an average of 95.98 MB/s write and 113.13 MB/s read.

Conclusion

The speed test results are excellent. Taking into account that the max theoretical speed for a 1 Gigabit connection is 125 MB/s. I would say it is probably the CIFS overheads that shaved a few MB/s off the speed.

The speed will be better if LACP (link aggregation) was used. It would theoretically achieve close to 2 times of the speeds above (e.g. 209 MB/s write and 240 MB/s read) provided that the CPU, Memory or hard disk are not the bottlenecks. I have done a similar speed test for Synology DS412+ so do check it out if you are interested.

The different parts of ASUSTOR AS-606T review

• ASUSTOR AS-606T Review – Introduction
• ASUSTOR AS-606T Review – Setting it up
• ASUSTOR AS-606T Review – ASUSTOR Data Master (ADM)
• ASUSTOR AS-606T Review – Speed Test!
• ASUSTOR AS-606T Review – Turning it into a HTPC with Boxee