Netgear's Marvell Based ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Review
by Ganesh T S on November 9, 2011 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- NAS
- NetGear
The introduction of the ReadyNAS Duo v2 and NV+ v2 shows that Netgear is still interested in catering to the economical prosumer segment of the NAS market. While players like Synology and QNAP also provide offerings with similar hardware specifications, they often carry a premium due to advanced firmware features that many consumers don't end up using.
The benchmarks indicate that the ReadyNAS lineup members based on the Marvell Kirkwood 6282 perform almost on par with those from Synology and QNAP. By sacrificing some features such as NFS and iSCSI and cutting back on the DRAM, Netgear has managed to deliver the members at half the price of the competition's offerings. In such a situation, it is hard to not give Netgear our seal of approval for the ReadyNAS NV+ v2 and Duo v2 units.
Our seal of approval doesn't mean that Netgear can rest on its laurels. The ReadyNAS Vault cloud backup service is slated to be available in the Duo v2 / NV+ v2 firmware sometime in the beginning of next year only. Unlike QNAP units, I don't expect out-of-the-box support for backup to storage services such as the Amazon S3. But, that is perfectly acceptable (It is conceivable that some add-on could be created for this purpose).
There is still lot of work that needs to be done with respect to the add-ons. While the redesigned FrontView interface is a pleasure to use, some of the key options (such as setting up of the FTP service) are not placed in a prominent manner. The RAIDiator 5.x interface is much improved, but it still needs some tweaks. However, these drawbacks don't take away the fact that the Duo v2 and NV+ v2 offer the best value for money for a majority of the consumers in this market.
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sunbear - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
If it was formatted as ntfs, this could explain the low 20MB/s backup performance. Netgear slumps by using the free ntfs-3g driver whereas qnap licences a ntfs driver from paragon which provides 3-4 times the performance. At this level of performance it would seem that USB 2.0 would have sufficed to handle that low level of performance.It might be worth retesting with ext3 format to see.if performance at USB 3.0 levels is achievable or whether the bottleneck is the weak Marvell CPU.
ganeshts - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
sunbear, Thanks for the note! Yes, it was a NTFS drive.Let me retest with ext3 formatting.
ganeshts - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
I retested with ext3, and the results are actually slightly worse than NTFS. But, as you say, NTFS performance could probably get an additional boost with a better driver. We can't say for sure whether that is the case without actually trying out another NTFS driver on the ReadyNAS. I will ask Netgear to analyze this further.sunbear - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
Thanks very much for EXT3 the retest. On a NAS that is designed for the budget consumer who will most likely want to backup their NAS via USB (rather than over Ethernet) it's particularly disappointing to see Netgear provide USB3 with the potential for speedy backups, but leave bottlenecks elsewhere effectively nullifying the whole point of having USB3 in the first place! It might be worth asking Netgear why they added the additional cost to include USB3 but then completely failed to utilize it.Regarding the NTFS vs EXT3 performance question - A year or more back it was the case the NTFS backups were slower on Readynas platforms than EXT3 backups, but it seems that the situation may have now reversed due to an update to the ntfs-3g driver to version 2011.1.15 (http://www.tuxera.com/community/release-history) in the most recent versions of the RAIDiator firmware. It now seems that Readynas Ultra 2 users are even finding similar results to your results (http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2902...
MTN Ranger - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
No NFS, no sale. I have a Synology DS210j at work and a DS210+ at home and they provide fast transfers and are reliable.ganeshts - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Since we have SSH access, it is possible that NFS could be enabled by end-users. I will also put in a word with Netgear :)QChronoD - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
I currently have a 6x 1.5TB drives running on an older Adaptec raid card (in RAID5). Unfortunately it's from right before auto-expansion became popular, so to increase my array I'd have to back it all up, add the new drives, make a new array and then copy everything back over.My question is whether it would be "better" to look into migrating to a NAS (that supports at least 15TB) or a newer RAID card that does support auto-expansion?? A quick look on Newegg showed that once you get over 4bays for the NAS, the cost jumps to $800-1K, and there isn't much thats larger than 6. However I've seen some 16ch RAID cards that are about the same price, and that would give me much greater future expansion.
(I'm not concerned with using a NAS to save power, since my computer is running 24/7 and I'm probably going to upgrade to a Ceton card next year.)
ganeshts - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
The Synology DS1511+ fits your expansion criteria, but it is pretty costly at > $800. unRAID solutions will also work (you can bring your own machine or look into the MD-1510 series). But, all of these are costly.From what I have heard, it is better to go with NAS solutions compared to RAID cards when it comes to 'set it up and forget it' scenarios.
JHBoricua - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
For the $399 asking price of a NV+ v2 diskless unit, I can get a HP Proliant Microserver with a dual core 1.5Ghz low voltage CPU, 2 GB of RAM, 250GB HD, Broadcom gigabit adapter and 2 expansion slots. An additional $99 gets you 8GB of RAM from Crucial. Fill it with 2TB Samsung F4 drives for another $300, slap Solaris 11 with napp.it as the front end and you'll have a much more capable device than the ReadyNAS that can do CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FCoE, Rsync, WebDav, and much more.ganeshts - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
The issue will be power consumption + customer support. For tech-savvy users, I do suggest going the self-build route, but many SMBs / SOHOs don't have time to build or maintain a NAS themselves.