Most benchmark programs that measure disk performance are limited to locally-attached drives only. SiSoft Sandra was the only one I had that can also measure the performance of a network file system. All I had to do is map a drive first to the share, then open the test and run it.
Sandra reports an average of around 7.5MB/s for the NAS 4220. That's a little on the low side when you consider that the theoretical maximum throughput on a 10/100 link is 12.5MB/s (100Mb/s). I also timed moving some files manually to and from the box. In these tests I used a single 500MB ISO for the large file test and a folder of 400+ pictures totaling 500MB for the small file test. As you can see, average read/write times were consistent with the SiSoft file system benchmark results.
I wanted to test USB transfer speed by connecting the computer directly to the NAS 4220, however this requires a type-A male to type-A male cable, which is a kind not commonly used, and one was not included with the device. Remember that only JBOD with a FAT32 file system is readable by a Windows PC in this scenario anyway.
Let's wrap up this review with some final thoughts and conclusion.
