Kensington SD4000 Docking Station Review

Wired LAN Performance

PassMark PerformanceTest Suite

Passmark has a great network performance testing tool that allows me to set the test conditions and control both the server and client side of operations. I’ll be testing the network connection for a continuous period of 5 minutes, first with a fixed packet size of 16384 bytes and then with a variable packet size ranging from 32 to 16384 bytes. The charts below will show the maximum, average, and minimum speed recorded with the LAN being connected through the docking station as well as through the onboard LAN. This will give us a good comparison if there is any performance impact from using the docking station over an onboard connection.

Fixed Block Size

To test the maximum throughput speed that a connection can handle, a fixed block size of 16384 Bytes is sent from the client to the server over a period of five minutes. The higher block size will allow the transfer rate to stay as high as possible – in the same way that large files transfer from one drive to another quicker than lots of small files of the same total size.

Variable Packet Size

In a real world situation, the blocks of data that pass through a network adaptor are not of the same size each time, so to give a more realistic impression of how an adaptor performs, the adaptor is once again tested for a period of five minutes. This time however, the block size will vary from 32 Bytes up to 16384 Bytes in increasing steps of 148.7 Bytes each time.

LAN Speed Tester

LAN Speed Tester is a very simple tool that pushes files in a given size to a target location, measuring the minimum, maximum and average throughput. A simple way to compare two connections with a static test.

Conclusion

The network performance wasn’t the best here and I am a little disappointed. We only about a third of the Gigabit connection in most instances. UDP connections work a lot better than the TCP tho and they are very close to the baseline comparison. It’s still not bad with over 300Mbps throughout the tests, which easily beats most wireless connections once they reach your system.