Western Digital My Cloud EX4 and LenovoEMC ix4-300d Home NAS Units Review
by Ganesh T S on February 26, 2014 2:30 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Western Digital
- LenovoEMC
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words
The LenovoEMC ix4-300d and WD EX4 are both 4-bay NAS units, and there are multiple applicable disk configurations (JBOD / RAID-0 / RAID-1 / RAID-5 / RAID-6 / RAID-10). Most users looking for a balance between performance and redundancy are going to choose RAID-5. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild duration testing as well as power consumption recording with the unit configured in RAID-5 mode. The disks used for benchmarking (WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||||
| Activity | LenovoEMC ix4-300d | Western Digital EX4 | ||
| Duration | Avg. Power | Duration | Avg. Power | |
| Idle (4D) | NA | 17.21 W | NA | 19.83 W |
| Single Disk Init (4TB in JBOD) | Immediate | 21.79 W | 14m | 24.36 W |
| 4 TB JBOD (1D) to 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) | 15h 44m | 32.31 W | 10h 45m | 32.65 W |
| 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) to 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) | 2d 9h 23m | 43.23 W | 1d 13h 42m | 42.62 W |
| 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) to 12 TB RAID-5 (4D) | 1d 7h 48m | 56.11 W | 28m* | 51.19 W* |
| 12 TB RAID-5 Rebuild (4D) | 1d 5h 34m | 53.06 W | 21h 33m | 52.83 W |
Note that the 3-disk RAID-5 to 4-disk RAID-5 expansion step is not applicable for the EX4. Instead, we have data from a fresh 4-disk RAID-5 initialization run in those cells.
Coming to the business end of the review, we find it hard to recommend either the ix4-300d or the EX4. While the ix4-300d turns out to be a better hardware platform (other than the absence of hot-swap capability), the WD EX4 turns out to be the one with a better set of features in the firmware. The performance of the ix4-300d is miles ahead of the WD EX4 for the same configuration, using the same disks. On top of that, the ix4-300d is cheaper too ($270 for the ix4-300d compared to $360 for the WD EX4 in a diskless configuration). However, LenovoEMC has stripped the ix4-300d of some essential features that many consumers take for granted in the NAS space.
Western Digital needs to go back to the drawing board from a hardware perspective. The hardware configuration heavily pulls down the performance. Putting in two USB 3.0 ports (when the SoC is apparently not configured to even take full advantage of the 4x SATA to PCIe x4 bridge) seems to be something done to tick a marketing checkbox item. Considering that WD is new to the 4-bay home-consumer NAS market, this can be excused. Hopefully, when the time comes for a refresh, more attention is paid to such aspects and we get a platform that can do justice to the firmware base that Western Digital has developed.
On the other hand, there is little to complain about the ix4-300d performance-wise. However, LenovoEMC needs to heavily reconsider the way they differentiate between their ix- and px- series units. Other vendors such as QNAP and Synology differentiate their ARM / x86 units only on platform performance (CPU and RAM). The firmware features (at least, those meant for the SOHO/home-consumer market) are uniform across both their ARM and x86 units. LenovoEMC risks losing market share to such vendors if they continue with their current differentiation plan.
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Sorwis - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link
Torrent clients are included in many NAS/home servers. I think every single Buffalo model has it and it's wonderful. Nothing wrong with torrents even though they are widely used to obtain copyrighted material.Zepid - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link
The 10 ten downloaded torrents last year were all legal, fyi.hoboville - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
Using SSH on the Lenovo unit voids the warranty? Of all the...nubian1 - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
I find reviews of NAS appliances very interesting. For the most part the majority of the available "Consumer Level" devices solidify my opinion that it's is better to build your own then to purchase a prepackaged device. Naturally this depends on the users tech level but honestly it isn't all that hard. Both on a performance and financial level, rolling your own more often than not will lead to better results. Rolling your own hardware combined with a great piece of software like FreeNAS, which btw is very extensible with plugins if needed, and you are off to the races at a cash outlay that will often be less than competing prepackaged devices and if the hardware is chosen correctly, better performance.demonbug - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
18-20 watts at idle seems pretty high for what looks like pretty low-powered solutions; that's only a few watts less than the 6-bay Xeon-based NAS from Netgear you reviewed a while back. Considering that in a home environment it is going to be spending 99% of the time idle, it seems like keeping the idle power use down would be very important. That said, I'm not too familiar with NAS products - do they keep the disks spinning at idle?ganeshts - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
The reported idle power is with 4 hard drives not fully spun down inside the NAS. The RN716 was idling with SSDs :)demonbug - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
Ah, makes sense. Thanks for the reply.jardows2 - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
This review makes me want to go price out building my own NAS. I do have a question though; What is the benefit of multiple NICs for a home NAS server? Link aggregation requires a special switch, and I cannot think that in a home/soho environment, network segregation would be needed. Failover redundancy could be a benefit, but I can't think of anything else.ganeshts - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
Link-aggregation enabled switches can be had for less than $100 [ like this one : http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-GS108T-NAS-Prosafe-8... ]Multiple NICs can be useful if you are running a server backing up data from multiple machines in the household (I know of many who backup the PCs in their household everyday at 3 AM -- so that is all simultaneous traffic).
MTN Ranger - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
How do these two NASs compare to a popular and similarly priced model like the Synology DS413j? For that matter, how about a review of the DS413j?