Netgear ReadyNAS 312 2-bay SMB / SOHO NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 11, 2013 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- IT Computing
- NetGear
- ReadyNAS
Setup and Usage Impressions
The Netgear ReadyNAS 312 is bundled with a 60W (12V @ 5A) adapter. Despite having two GbE links, only one network cable is supplied. The power cord is customized to the country of sale. Our evaluation started with a diskless system. After connection to the network, the unit could be discovered by RAIDar (offline discovery tool that has been around since the first generation ReadyNAS units). In addition, Netgear has also incorporated cloud discovery using the ReadyCLOUD service. Discovery worked well, and, as the steps indicated, starting off with fresh disks would have been straightforward too. Unfortunately, I put in a single disk with existing partitions (fresh from another NAS unit) and ended up with more problems than I bargained for. I still can't understand why NAS vendors (Netgear is not alone in this) refuse to format the disk after providing sufficient warning to the user. In any case, even with pre-formatted disks, it is possible to fully re-initialize the NAS unit by following some key press sequence after a factory reset (outlined in the supplied setup guide).
Netgear has completely reworked the UI for ReadyNAS OS. While it is not a very fancy desktop-like environment or mobile app-like interface, it already appears ready for use on touch-oriented operating systems. The interface is minimal, yet functional. One doesn't get fancy 'multitasking' features in the interface, but, for a business NAS, this is hardly an issue. The gallery below presents some screenshots from the ReadyNAS OS 6.0 UI.
One of the interesting aspects about the ReadyNAS OS 6.0 is the integrated snapshot facility. You can read Netgear's marketing whitepaper here (PDF). While btrfs has a COW (Copy-on-Write) snapshot mechanism, Netgear opts for a pointer-based one. This allows minimal performance impact. Snapshots can also be setup at frequent intervals due to low performance impact. The clincher, in our opinion, is for Windows clients. Files on a CIFS share mounted in Windows can use the snapshot copies as previous versions directly. The usage of this feature is outlined in the YouTube video here.
The ReadyNAS 312 is a 2-bay unit. Users can opt for automatic X-RAID protection or manually set the RAID level to 0 or 1. We benchmarked the unit with the RAID level manually set to 1 (same as X-RAID 2). Both network ports were bonded with dynamic link aggregation. We used two Western Digital WD4000FYYZ RE drives as the test disks. Our testbed configuration is outlined below.
| AnandTech NAS Testbed Configuration | |
| Motherboard | Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual LGA2011 SSI-EEB |
| CPU | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630L |
| Coolers | 2 x Dynatron R17 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL (8x8GB) CAS 10-10-10-30 |
| OS Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Secondary Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Tertiary Drive | OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid (1TB HDD + 100GB NAND) |
| Other Drives | 12 x OCZ Technology Vertex 4 64GB (Offline in the Host OS) |
| Network Cards | 6 x Intel ESA I-340 Quad-GbE Port Network Adapter |
| Chassis | SilverStoneTek Raven RV03 |
| PSU | SilverStoneTek Strider Plus Gold Evoluion 850W |
| OS | Windows Server 2008 R2 |
| Network Switch | Netgear ProSafe GSM7352S-200 |
Thank You!
We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:
- Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
- Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
- Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
- Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
- Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the RevoDrive Hybrid
- Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
- Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.
- Thanks to Western Digital for the eight WD RE hard drives (WD4000FYYZ) to use in the NAS under test.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
18 Comments
View All Comments
mcfrede - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Final paragraph states the product name as the "ReadyNSA" am I the only one to find that interpretation hilarious? (sorry for being slightly off topic).ganeshts - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Thanks for noticing that. I fixed the typo now :)jramskov - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Using btrf is certainly an interesting choice. It would be nice to see an article that explains the advantages of using it instead of ext4.WilliamG - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Ganesh, Thanks for the review - just wondering if you know if this unit supports Hyper-V virtual machines via SMB ? I have been trying to find out from Netgear for a couple of days but no one can answer me. Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V allows the use of SMB 3 file shares to host virtual machine files. Can this unit work for me? thanks in advancewarezme - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
To be honest I haven't ever really considered a NAS for storage but if I were, a two bay NAS seems a bit useless to me. So you can do RAID 1 and lose half of your storage or do RAID 0 and gain your space but lose any hopes of recovery if one of your drives dies. Wouldn't a 3 bay NAS be the minimum common sense size?bsd228 - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
You don't lose half your storage with Raid1. Unreliable storage has limited value. You keep all of your data if one drive fails, which is a lot better than what happens with a failure on any of those 1 disk NAS units out there. If you want capacity or higher performance, then you get a 4+ disk unit, or roll your own.brian.goodman - Saturday, December 7, 2013 - link
When I had a drive failure on the first drive of the RAID pair in my old ReadyNAS Duo, I learned that the second RAID drive was not accessible, since the ReadyNAS Duo boots from an operating system installed on the first drive. ReadyNAS RAIDar could not even see the NAS, so it was not possible to diagnose the problem through the software interface. Instead I had to decode the blinking lights on the ReadyNAS to deduce that the first drive had failed.Is this still the case in the current generation of ReadyNAS products? In fact is that the case with other NAS products?
Losing the ability to use RAIDar and Frontview was a big surprise and I would have expected that to be flagged in product reviews. What happens after drive failure is not something I have seen reported in any NAS review, but it is very important, as most users expect to be able to access the second RAID drive in case of failure.
Could you add failure mode analysis to your reviews, covering whether the NAS is accessible through software for diagnostic purposes (as against physical inspection of a box), and whether the remaining drives of a multi-drive NAS are actually useable one a failure mode occurs?
Thanks,
Brian