NASLite Network Attached Storage

For someone who has used this, can you explain what the purpose of this software is? As soon as I have time, I am going to download it, and try it.

I like the information it gives, I have seen it here on this forum.

But what is it testing exactly? Im guessing what it is doing is telling us how much information it can read from and write to a hard drive, across a LAN.

If thats true, then that means its taking into account the network speed 10/100/1000Mbps and also how fast (or slow) the hard drives on the test machine are.

Is that what its doing?

Thanks

Diskwriggler is a benchmarking program. Essentially it simulates read/writing video to a local or network drive.

As of lately I've been using it, and dbench to benchmark NASLite v2 on a variety of machines in our test rack, highest machine being a Dell PowerEdge 1750 Dual 2.8 ghz Zeons (actually 3 of them), 2gigs of ram, hardware raid 1, gig nic

ohhh you said the magic words version 2.0. I have seen people talking about it here. And waiting for it. So any idea when it might be available.

Diskwriggler sounds awesome. I cant believe how many good things you can find on the internet. Including my new favorite: NASLite+

I mostly want and need to be able to verify the approximate speed at which I can write video data from SageTV, across the network, to a file server like NASLite+. DiskWriggler sounds perfect. And cost is nice!

I cant wait to try it. And I really want 2.0. I bet it will be really nice!

I read thru the 3 page help file, and I dont understand all the implications of all the parameters.

Here is a sample from another post from the forum:
diskwriggler -NTSC -C -t -n 2000 -o Z:\
Where Z: is mapped to the share. Final filesize is about 1.3GB

**********************************
I was envisioning that you had to point at a filename for it to read. Like a mpeg2 video file or something. But maybe it just creates a file on its own. (BTW, does it create and save an actual file on the target drive?) or does it create it, and erase it when its done with its test?

I have used some network bandwidth testing software, and I started off by first specifying the file I wanted to transfer. And then monitored how it streamed across the network.

But it seems that DiskWriggler is creating a file on the file. Any explanations of it would be so helpful. Sorry for dumb questions.

MMMM so Ralph I take it u was running Raid with V2? and if thats the case I suspect it will work with the High Point bios?
or am I a little to far ahead of myself.

suprised no one else noticed..

Eden

steingra,

Diskwriggler creates a file named framestream.dat based on the parameters you supply. It will write the generated file to the location you specify (Z:\) and then read it back. It leaves the framestream.dat file on Z:\ so you may want to erase it when you're done with the test. (It can be a couple GB in size)

The program is designed to test performance of streaming video over a network, and the various parameters tell it what kind of video (NTSC, PAL, or HD) and how many frames the video contains (the 2000 parameter). NASLite users can use it to test how their system performs when transferring a large file. This will simulate streaming DVD/MPEG video over your network and give you an idea of the performance of your NASLite box.

The -C parameter just tells it to put all the frames into one file. If you leave the -C off it generates an individual file for each frame. So you would have 2000 files on your NASLite drive!

The -t parameter tells it to print progress info every 50 frames or so. This lets you know something is happening. It also controls the 3 line report at the end. If you leave the -t off you just get the average rates. With it on you get min avg max rates. You can leave the -t option off if you don't care to get the info.

The -n 2000 tells it how many frames to transfer. In the example 2000 frames are transfered, which is a little over one minute of NTSC video at 30 frames/second. You must supply this parameter. You can get benchmark numbers quicker with smaller numbers. For example you could use -n 500 and the MB/sec results should be similar to using -n 2000. You're just transfering a "smaller" big file

And lastly the -o Path option tells it where to write the framestream.dat file. Z:\ was used in the example. You can put in any existing path you want. It will fail if you specify a path that doesn't already exist.

At the end of the write phase it will print out a 3 line summary of how many frames were written and how long it took, along with the FPS and MB/sec min avg max rates (if you used -t). Same thing at the end of the read phase.

The FPS rate is for full screen, uncompressed video. Don't worry if you get a number less than 30FPS. You will still be able to stream MPG/DVD video since these are compressed. The number to look at is the MB/sec. Anything over 4MB/s should be able to stream most regular definition DVD/MPG files. High Def files will need a bit more.

Hope this helps.

OK, so I ran DiskWriggler on my first NasLite+ system (running from a bootable USB drive)

Here are the results. I know they are kind of low, but it IS an older system with older drives.

Write Summary : 2000.00 frames in 126.72 secs
: 14.92(min) 15.78(avg) 16.28(max) FPS
: 9.96(min) 10.53(avg) 10.86(max) MB/s


Read Summary : 2000.00 frames in 270.51 secs
: 1.60(min) 7.39(avg) 8.21(max) FPS
: 1.07(min) 4.93(avg) 5.48(max) MB/s


MY QUESTIONS ARE
1. Is FPS the frames per second it can handle?

2. What is normal for FPS across a 100 Mbps network? I mean what FPS rate do you need to get normal viewing/sound quality if I was playing large mpeg2 videos from the NASLite+ server to a Windows XP box? I really dont remember the frames per second typical rate.

3. Why is reading 1/2 speed of writing? It seems that writing should take longer than reading? But obviously something (probably many factors) are causing the reads to be 50% slower than writing. That seems backwards to me, but shows my ignorance of whats happening behind the scenes here.

4. The other thing is that when I was using my SageTV client across this same network, it was using about 4 Mbps that like ~.5MB/sec of bandwidth. So it *SEEMS* to me that if the drive can handle 10MB/sec...that I should have no problems recording/writing Mpeg2 videos to the NASLite server.

Thanks for any info on this

Answers to some of your questions:

1. Yes, the FPS number is how many frames of uncompressed video can be handled. As I mentioned in the prior post, the FPS figure isn't used for mpeg video, only if you are streaming raw uncompressed video. For mpeg you need to know the maximum and average bitrate in the mpeg stream. For normal DVD video the MAXIMUM you can have is 8MB/sec. Typically you'll only see 4-5MB/sec so you should be able to stream DVD quality mpeg video. If it's DIVX or XVID encoded it will typically be 1-2MB/sec.

2. In North America the standard FPS for television is 29.97 FPS. In other parts of the world it is 25 FPS. Again, don't worry about the FPS rate from diskwriggler. Focus on the MB/sec rate.

3. Don't know My read speed is somewhat less than write speed as well. I'm thinking behind the scenes the NASLite box can get the write data and say it's done writing before it actually is. It just buffers up the writes so the sending computer can go off and get the data for the next write ready. For reads it can't say it's done until it actually has data so it has to wait for the drive. Or I could be totally wrong!

4. I would agree that it shouldn't be a problem writing/reading mpeg video to the NASLite box. My read numbers are around 7MB/sec and I can stream mpeg videos without a problem.

Psst.. DVD spec video is 9.6Mb/sec maximum.. that's Mega_bits_. Not Bytes.