WD My Cloud EX4100 Benchmarks

Last week, I posted my review of the Western Digital My Cloud EX4100 NAS. I had not completed my benchmarking tests at that time, so this is a follow-up post to share about those results. The My Cloud EX4100 is showing some pretty good performance on the Bonnie++ benchmarks that I ran.

Just as a quick introduction for those unfamiliar with Bonnie++. It is a file system benchmarking tool for Unix-like operating systems. It tests both the file system performance as well as the underlying storage hardware performance. I have switched to using Bonnie++ for some time because it produces more consistent results, and is easy to script tests.

Before diving into the Bonnie++ results, let me recap, from my previous post, that the My Cloud EX4100 can deliver about 99 MB/s read performance when copying a file out of the NAS. In terms of writes, the EX4100 scored 92 MB/s in RAID 0 mode and 79 MB/s in RAID 5 mode, when copying a file into the NAS. All tests are done from a client connected via a GigabitEthernet switch to the EX4100, and copying a largish file of about 3 GB size.

Bonnie++ shows similar results.

	Read (MB/s)	Write (MB/s)
RAID 0	101	88
RAID 5	100	79
RAID 0 (encrypted)	100	51
RAID 5 (encrypted)	100	46

I also tested the My Cloud EX4100 using its built-in encryption features, and the benchmark results are also in the above table. Encryption seems not to impact read performance, but does exact a toll on write performance. If writes are important to you, then you may have to decide if the overheads are worth the security benefits.