Test Setup & Methodology
I use an Asustor Drivestor 4 AS1104T NAS with a 2.5 Gbit Ethernet port as a test server. The configuration of the NAS is shown below.
| Internal Disks: | 4x ADATA Ultimate 3D SU800 256 GB |
| Firmware: | 4.2.0.RE71 |
Besides the Asustor NAS, I also use two PCs equipped with NVMe drives and TP-Link AX3000 WiFi 6 PCIe adapters as clients.
Methodology
I use three programs to evaluate the router’s performance. The first is custom-made. It performs ten basic file transfer tests and measures the average MB/s speed for each.
I also perform two-client tests using a special version of the same program. All clients are synchronized and operate in parallel.
The second program I use in my test sessions is DiskSpd by Microsoft, a highly flexible storage test tool capable of accurately simulating different workloads. I wrote two advanced scripts, one that mimics an On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) system and another that simulates an On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) system. The OLTP scenario consists of many short transactions, with Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) playing a pivotal role. In my OLAP scenario, the number of transactions is low, but the queries can be very complex. Response times are crucial for an OLAP system, and the maximum throughput speed is reached in this scenario because the block size is quite large.
OLTP systems generally gather input information and store it in a database. This is done on an enormous scale, and the most common operations are INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. An OLTP database holds detailed, current data; an entity model, usually 3NF, is used as the schema to store transactional databases. An OLTP database usually has high read-to-write ratios, typically 90/10 to 70/30.
OLAP systems are used to analyze the data stored in a database. OLAP systems mainly apply select operations in large data warehouses to collect information (data mining). An OLAP database consists of aggregated, historical data stored in multi-dimensional schemas (usually star schemas). Their read-to-write ratio is very high; sometimes, there might only be read operations.
The third program I use to evaluate the router’s performance is Librespeed, which I have installed on the Asustor NAS.
