Mediasonic SU2LA Dual Bay RAID + NAS Review

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good synthetic benchmarks like IOZone are it can not really tell you how your NAS will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of review items true capabilities. To this end we will be running timed data transfers over a typical network to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. In general a NAS will be used on a day to day basis for either transferring large multi Gigabyte files (for example .ISO’s) or a random mix of small to medium files (for example .mp3 and album art). To help replicate these conditions we will be we will transfer a 4.32GB single contiguous RAR file and a folder containing that includes 40 subfolders and over 4000 files varying in length from 8mb to 6kb (6.50 GB total). Testing will include transfer too, and transferring from the devices timing each process individually to provide Read and Write performance.



They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case it’s more like a thousand sighs. It is not really fair to compare a 100 megabit NAS with a gigabit jumbo packet capable device (like the QNAP TS 109 and 409) but the Plextor shown above is a 100 megabit NAS and even it easily beats the Mediasonic SU2LA. The best thing you can say about recorded times like these is that at least it’s fairly consistent. Regardless of file size, transfer speed (both read and write) was in the 5000 – 6000 KB/s range. While these numbers are perfectly fine for music streaming they would not necessarily be high enough for movies without a lot of buffering (though it does depend on the format used, Divx/Xvid would be more fine but DVDs probably not). Overall, it is a value orientated NAS and as such its main priority is obviously not speed.


Extended Runtime Testing

Where this unit is marketed towards the consumer environment, it is reasonable to expect it to be able to handle moderate extended usage, with random multiple requests for data. To test how robust this unit is, and how well their cooling would work under a heavy workload, the SU2LA was subjected to a 48 hour nonstop session. During this time the enclosure were directed to not only fill and then empty their contents but were also expected to handle multiple simultaneous read and write requests from different computers on the network.

After approximately 16hours of nonstop use the MediaSonic NAS for no apparent reason “locked up” and had to be reset. It is not clear why it did this as both hard drives were only warm to the touch but none were overly hot and all appeared to be adequately cooled. More importantly the Oxford controller chip and the CodeTek while very warm to the touch, were not hot enough to burn skin or to have heat damage. A simple power cycle cleared this issue up and the test “clock” was reset and 48 hours later the NAS continued to work perfectly as if there had been no “hiccup” at all during this testing phase. This unit really is not meant for heavy multitasking as its low speeds did get worse under heavy loads, but it did manage to complete this test with the only one minor problem. Overall this unexplained snag is puzzlingly but as it was quickly fixed so it is not overly worrisome.