We are looking at purchasing a NAS device to integrate into our environment. One thing I have discovered is that the NAS devices marketed to the small/mid size businesses tend to be fairly slow. Now this would be fine if all we were doing was using it for backups etc... but my desire is to use the device to house live data for regular storing and retrieval by our design group - of about 6 users. In order to find the proper type of NAS device, I would like to know exactly what type of throughput I am currently getting from our 3-drive IDE raid5 system being used now. Once I know this, then I will have an idea of what to look for in a NAS device. One the the devices I am looking at (Snap Server 410) published throughput rates in a 4-drive RAID5 system of about 252 mbits/second (30mbytes/sec) with an average response time of 0.757 milliseconds. This is still somewhat slow but may be acceptable. I would like to see how that compares with our existing Win2K server. There must be a ton of free tools out there that could perform such a test on my server. Could someone point me to one such tool??? (and/or offer some additional advice???) Thanks, Brad
