Rick’s Rants and Raves

When I bought the NSLU2, I was aware of complaints on Amazon that the device was “slow.” For the most part, I thought the complainers didn’t understand the difference between a network device, a USB device, and an EIDE device. I could tell that it wasn’t as fast as a local drive, but I didn’t think it would be.

Then one day I tried to transfer some files from my PC running Ubuntu. It seemed to take forever. I decided to abort the process and go about it a different way. So that got me thinking that there really was something to the whole “Its slow” complaint. So, I tested.

Here is my network setup. The NSLU2 is connected to my WRT54G. That device is connected to a Linksys 10/100 switch. I have two PCs connected to the 10/100 switch. I also connect my laptop to that switch.

Methodology: I did two different tests three times between two devices.

• Laptop to NSLU2
• NSLU2 to Laptop
• Laptop to Desktop
• Desktop to Laptop

The two test were:

• Copy one large file (nearly 60 MB)
• Copy many smaller files (315 files, 40 folders, 1.7MB)

The laptop is running Windows XP Pro. The Desktop is running Windows XP Home. The NSLU2 is running the factory default firmware V2.3R63. I’ll probably put Unslung on it soon, but that is for another post. The Desktop has a folder shared on it to which the laptop has write access. I mapped drives to both the desktop and the NSLU2, then used a batch file to copy the files to and from and time the response.

The results between the three runs of each test were very consistent. I present here the average bandwidth in Kilobytes per second (kilo=1024 bytes):

So, on pure bandwidth hogs, the NSLU2 is less than half the speed of transfering to or from another PC. The real killer for the NSLU2 is evidently in creating the files and structures. Here it was less than 1/5th the speed of the PC. Copying all those files from the NSLU2 only had the half speed performance hit; same as with the big file.

Is this conclusive? Nah, not hardly. Does it give a pretty clear picture? Oh yeah. My full results are in the Test Results.

To Do: Make a Turbo Slug to see what kind of difference that will make. Done!
To Do: Install UnSlung Done!