First, thanks for everyone’s interest in NiuBi! A lot of people have been asking about various benchmarks. This update has some initial benchmark results and also answers some other common questions.

Drive Temperature

Here, you can see the idle drive temperatures a NiuBi Personal Cloud 1 (NB-PC1) populated with six drives I happen to have lying around.

root@niubi-n1:~# hddtemp /dev/sd?
/dev/sda: WDC WD5000BEVT-75A0RT0: 35°C
/dev/sdb: WDC WD5000BPVT-00HXZT1: 35°C
/dev/sdc: WDC WD5000BPVT-00HXZT1: 31°C
/dev/sdd: TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100V: 35°C
/dev/sde: ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB: 35°C
/dev/sdf: WDC WD5000BPVT-00HXZT1: 29°C

Performance Tests Setup

NB-PC1 has four interfaces for reading data from or writing data to its (up to) six drives:

• SATA
• Gigabit Ethernet
• USB 3.0
• USB 2.0

NB-PC1 uses three ASM1061 PCI-to-SATA bridge chips. It does not use USB for the SATA ports.

These performance tests compare SATA, USB 3.0, and USB 2.0. We’re working on Ethernet tests and will announce those results in a separate update.

The disk reading and writing benchmarks were taken on a NB-PC1 prototype populated with two 2.5" drives:

• Seagate 1 TB ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB
• Western Digital 500 GB WDC WD5000BEVT

Both disks were formatted with the EXT4 filesystem. These are single run tests with no attempt to average the results. The results were generated with dd using the methodology described at https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Linux_I/O_Performance_Tests_using_dd.

Read Performance

For reading tests, the exact command for all tests was:

time dd if=/mnt/test bs=1024k of=/dev/null count=1024

As shown in the above command, the total number of bytes read for each test was 1.1 GB:

1024k x 1024 = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1.1 GB

The following table lists the read speeds for the various combinations of drive and interface.

Write Performance

For writing tests, the exact command for all tests was:

time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=/mnt/test count=1024

As with the reading tests, the total number of bytes written for each test was 1.1 GB.

The following table lists the read speeds for the various combinations of drive and interface.

More Benchmarks on the Way

We’re working on Ethernet performance, encrypted versus unencrypted performance, and other benchmarks we will share in a future update. Stay tuned!

3.5" Drives

We’ve received a bunch of requests for a 3.5" drive option. On one hand, 3.5" drives are generally cheaper than 2.5" drives. On the other hand, 2.5" drives are smaller, more power efficient, and have a wider selection of SSD options. If NB-PC1 reaches its funding goal, we will very likely follow up with a 3.5" version.

Thanks again for all the questions and support, and feel free to ask more questions!

Cheers,
Larry and the NiuBi team