After some tinkering on my filer, I once again found myself looking for a simple tool to check the performance of a network share under Windows (SMB/CIFS). The usual disk benchmark tools such as Crystal DiskMark and AS SSD benchmark typically only works for local block devices.
This time I was in luck, and found a blog entry which pointed out that an older version of ATTO seemed to be just the thing for a simple analysis of network share performance: http://sburke.eu/blog/2011/04/quick-disk-benchmark-for-windows/
Of course, now I need to work out why the filer’s external storage performs rather poorly over the network, and possibly how to improve on the situation.