NAS performance variation - crossover vs switch

[damonrand]

   

Hi,

 

I've been checking the performance of my linkstation using iozone.

    iozone -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 -f l:/_bench/1 -r 64k -q 64k -n 64M -g 64M

 

I'm getting about what I expected except for some funny results with random reads..

 

Linkstation - Crossover cable

 

Read = 10.3-10.5

Write = 8.7-9.5

Random Read = 9.2-9.6

Random Write = 12.5-13.7

 

Linkstation - Asus gigibit router

 

Read = 8.3-9.4

Write = 7.9-9.5

Random Read = **3.4-3.6**

Random Write = 12.9-13.2

 

As you can see through a router connections are just slightly slower than with a direct cross-over cable. But why are random reads so much slower through the router than the with the crossover cable? 

 

Cheers, 

Damon.

[Colin137]

That's a really hard question to answer... I'm not familiar with that program, and don't know how it deals with network drives.

 

My intuition says that something is strange with the asus router, but that's kind of grasping as straws.

 

What speeds do you get when transferring a single large (say, a couple GB) file to the device?