Icy Box IB-NAS3221 NAS Review

Written by Antony Leather

December 29, 2010 | 10:09

Tags: #icybox #nas-box #raid

Companies: #icy-box #qnap #synology

How we tested

Any device connected to a Gigabit LAN will have maximum read and write speeds of 125MB/sec. However, just as the controller chip on an SSD has a huge effect on the drive's speed, the same is also true for NAS boxes. As they’ll be used for storing lots of tiny files, as well as large video files, we used two 5GB folders (one full of small files, and the other packed with large video files) in order to gauge the flexibility of each box.

Our test involves writing to each NAS box separately, and then reading from them. The small file folder was filled with 10,000 files that included photos, Word documents and short videos, while the large file folder comprised three 1.7GB videos.

We installed the same 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard drive in each NAS box, which was connected to a Netgear Gigabit Ethernet switch for all of the read and write tests. We recorded the time it took to transfer each folder in seconds, and used this result to work out the average transfer rate. You can see the speed test results in the graphs below.

Icy Box IB-NAS3221 NAS Review How we tested and speed test results

To read and write from the NAS box, we use a PC built around an Asus P7H55-M motherboard, 4GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM and an Intel Pentium G6950 CPU overclocked to 4GHz. To eliminate any reading or writing bottleneck at the PC end, we also used a Corsair X128 SSD.

Once a NAS box is up and running, we then also try out all of the features, such as shared folders, iTunes servers, iSCSI and Bit-Torrent clients, in order to see how easy they are to set up and use on a regular basis. In addition, we also take noise and hard drive temperature into consideration, as well as the build quality.

Speed Test Results


Large File Test - Read Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Synology DS210+
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • Edimax NS-2502
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • 43.5
  • 38.6
  • 37.0
  • 35.4
  • 21.1
  • 16.5
  • 15.5
  • 10.0
  • 0.0
0
10
20
30
40
MB/sec Higher is Better

Large File Test - Write Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS210+
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • Edimax NS-2502
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • 51.0
  • 27.0
  • 22.8
  • 18.2
  • 13.3
  • 12.7
  • 11.6
  • 9.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
MB/sec Higher is Better

Small File Test - Read Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS210+
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • Edimax NS-2502
  • 22.0
  • 21.1
  • 17.0
  • 15.5
  • 9.9
  • 9.8
  • 1.0
  • 0.0
0
5
10
15
20
25
MB/sec Higher is Better

Small File Test - Write Speed

Arranged by Transfer Speed

  • Synology DS210+
  • QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS
  • QNAP TS-210 Turbo NAS
  • LG N2B1D
  • Icy Box IB-NAS3221
  • ZyXEL NSA-220 Plus
  • Xtreamer eTRAYz
  • Edimax NS-2502
  • 27.0
  • 17.6
  • 14.2
  • 10.3
  • 6.4
  • 4.5
  • 1.0
  • 0.0
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
MB/sec Higher is Better

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