| Article Index |
|---|
| Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ Review |
| Functionality |
| The Out Of Box Experience |
| Performance |
| Is the ReadyNAS NV+ For Me? |
| Conclusion and Thoughts |
| All Pages |
The ReadyNAS has a beautiful administrative interface, and supports every computer built since the dawn of modern IT (well, OK anything since about 1995), but if it's too slow to be useful ther's not much point. No-one really wants to wait for half an hour to copy a movie to their brand new network disk, when it takes 2 minutes to a disk inside their PC.
So how well does the ReadyNAS perform?
The tests use the following two data sets:
Small Files:
- 2144 files, in
- 311 directories, totalling
- 136,417,700 bytes (130.10 MB)
Large Files:
- 27 files, in
- 17 directories, totalling
- 783,609,012 bytes (747.30 MB)
The test client was configured as follows:
- Acer R510 Server (Intel 7320 Chipset)
- 2GB DDR-333 ECC RAM (2 x 1GB dual channel)
- 3.0GHz/800MHz Intel Xeon
- HighPoint RocketRAID 2210 PCI-X card in 64 bit, 133MHz slot
- 3 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives in RAID 5
- Intel Pro/1000 MT Network Connection
- Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64
To understand whether the server itself would be a limit, the dataset was copied from one directory on the server to another on the same disk (a stress test). On the small file set the server averaged 26,930,343 bytes per second, or 1541.0 MB per minute. On the large file set, the server was faster at 64,884,409 bytes per second, or 3712.7 MB per minute.
All tests were conducted five times and the average taken after discarding any results that were obviously different from the rest. Tests using FTP were slower than Windows file/print sharing and thus the Windows results are shown here.
| Source | Target | Data Set | Bytes Per Second | Megabytes Per Minute | %age of PC to PC |
| PC | NAS | Small Files | 1,923,858 | 110.1 | 7.1 % |
| PC | NAS | Large Files | 14,984,439 | 857.4 | 23.1 % |
| NAS | PC | Small Files | 4,592,773 | 262.8 | 17.1 % |
| NAS | PC | Large Files | 29,095,649 | 1664.9 | 44.8 % |
Stress Test
| Source | Target | Data Set | Bytes Per Second | Megabytes Per Minute | %age of PC to PC |
| NAS | NAS | Small Files | 1,408,230 | 80.6 | 5.2 % |
| NAS | NAS | Large Files | 10,372,611 | 593.5 | 16.0 % |
The performance results from the ReadyNAS NV+ are strikingly similar to the ReadyNAS Duo - in fact, most of the results are within 2% of the much cheaper Duo. In going from the Duo to the NV+, we've added two disks. In testing the Duo, we increased the amount of cache memory by a factor of 4. Neither change improved the performance. The network interface is capable of Gigabit speeds (more than 120 MB/sec - 4 times faster than the best the NV+ could manage in any test). In this context it becomes clear that the limiting factor in performance is likely the custom CPU - the common component.
The results of the performance testing are disappointing, to say the least. So low were these results, in fact, that I ran the performance tests against a Hyper-V virtual machine on another test host - and the virtual machine exceeded the performance of the ReadyNAS in every test. Despite being well optimised for disk activity (witness the 50MB per second at which the NAS rebuilds a disk), the embedded CPU is simply not powerful enough to run the disk and the network at full speed at the same time. In fact, while copying files to and from the NAS, the embedded CPU would often be running at 100%, and yet at other times would be idling while the test PCs were waiting for data.
