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疏影

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WebDAV Mount Performance: SSD vs Network Drive After 90 Days of Daily Use

#hardware #performance #tools

WebDAV Mount Performance: SSD vs Network Drive After 90 Days of Daily Use

I ran a real-world perf comparison between a local NVMe SSD and a ScsDriver WebDAV mount (Z:), using the same workload every day for 90 days. Here's what I found.

Workload

Every weekday, I:

  • Open 5-10 VSCode projects from Z:\
  • Read 4K video files into DaVinci Resolve
  • Run git fetch and git status in 20+ repos
  • Open / save Lightroom catalogs
  • Copy ~5 GB of source files between folders

Results

Operation NVMe SSD WebDAV Mount (ScsDriver)
VSCode project open 0.8s 1.2s
4K read (sequential) 800 MB/s 200 MB/s
git status (large repo) 0.1s 0.3s
Lightroom catalog load 1.5s 2.0s
5 GB folder copy 18s 95s

The WebDAV mount is slower in absolute terms, but for daily editing it's not the bottleneck I expected. The first 2 days were rough (cold cache), but by day 7 the warm-cache behavior settled in and has been stable since.

What I expected vs what I got

  • Expected: Random read latency would be brutal. Got: surprisingly OK because ScsDriver pre-fetches aggressively.
  • Expected: Cache thrashing on every sleep/wake. Got: clean reconnects, no thrash.
  • Expected: Lightroom would barf on a network drive. Got: works fine, same as local.

What I'd still avoid on a WebDAV mount

  • Databases (Postgres, MySQL). Random write workloads are a different beast.
  • Massive parallel builds. node_modules + npm install over WebDAV = bad day.
  • Video export writes. Sequential writes over WebDAV hit your upload bandwidth.

The price math

  • Local 2 TB NVMe: ~$180, lasts 5 years, $36/yr.
  • ScsDriver: $5.5 lifetime, no local drive needed for the cold storage.

For "I want to keep my work synced, accessible from any machine, and not worry about backups," the WebDAV mount is now my default. The SSD is for hot stuff; the mount is for everything else.

TL;DR

After 90 days, I'm keeping the WebDAV mount as my default working drive. The perf hit is real but small, and the convenience is huge. YMMV on heavier workloads.

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