Bubba Two - some performance numbers

Here are my experience with the Bubba Two NAS so far. Below are some performance numbers.

Write locally:

  lks@bubba:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=1K
  1024+0 records in
  1024+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 96.8614 seconds, 11.1 MB/s

Testing raw network traffic:

  lks@bubba:~$ iperf -c 192.168.1.10
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  Client connecting to 192.168.1.10, TCP port 5001
  TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  [  3] local 192.168.1.3 port 54697 connected with 192.168.1.10 port 5001
  [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  76.4 MBytes  64.1 Mbits/sec

Write over NFS (exported with UDP):

  root@titan:/mnt/lks# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=1K
  1024+0 records in
  1024+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 174.882 s, 6.1 MB/s

During the test, the CPU clocks in at about 70%. Since the disk can deliver almost the double of that, I guess the bottleneck is the bus.

Downloading over ftp give around 7-8MB/s (~55-65Mbits/s). Samba around 5-6MB/s (~40-48Mbit/s).

These numbers are more than adequate for most of my multimedia needs. A 720p HD film encoded in MPEG2 needs around 20Mbits/s (~2.4MB/s). But since most films are encoded using MPEG4 (or similar) - a proper encoded 1080p movie will only require around 2-3MB/s.

The Bubba Two NAS

My balcony server finally died on my the other day. It has been running 24/7 for four years in all kinds of weather. I wasn't very surprised - in fact I've been waiting for it to happen. The motherboard had died. I've replaced the motherboard, and its back up. But for how long before a disk or something else fails?

I have backup of (mostly) everything here and there, but I would like to have everything on a separate NAS box. One of the most exciting NAS boxes on the market right now is something called Bubba|Two.

Bubba Two is produced by the Swedish company Excito. Its basically a small Linux server with a big disk. You can use the slick web-interface, or you can ssh into the NAS and treat it like an ordinary Linux-server. It is a LAMP server with SSH running Debian Etch. Samba, proftpd and Mediatomb (upnp) provide the box with file-server capabilities. It even have Squeezecenter installed if you have a Squeezebox (which I happen to have).

Its a ARM processor clocked at 333MHz with 256MB RAM and a 2TB disk. It uses ridiculous low amount of power (max 12W). There is no fan, so the only noise is from the HDD itself - which is barely audible.

Since the default apt-repositories are no longer working (Etch is too old), I change sources.list to:

  deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ etch main

I can now proceed to install NFS-server, Munin-node and Bind. A couple of minutes later, and its all running smoothly. Too easy.