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
Single Client Performance - CIFS and NFS on Linux
We have recently revamped our Linux-client testing for NAS units, shifting from IOMeter to IOZone. Unfortunately, the ix4-300d was evaluated using the old methodology, so we won't have numbers for that unit in here. This section will deal only with the performance of the WD EX4. A CentOS 6.2 virtual machine was used to evaluate NFS and CIFS performance of the NAS when accessed from a Linux client. In order to standardize the testing across multiple NAS units, the following parameters were used to mount the NFS and Samba shares:
mount -t nfs NAS_IP:/PATH_TO_NFS_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER
mount -t cifs //NAS_IP/PATH_TO_SMB_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER
Note that these are slightly different from what we used to run in our previous NAS reviews. The following IOZone command was used to benchmark the shares:
IOZone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT -f /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_CSV.csv
IOZone provides benchmark numbers for a multitude of access scenarios with varying file sizes and record lengths. Some of these are very susceptible to caching effects on the client side. This is evident in some of the graphs in the gallery below.
Readers interested in the hard numbers can refer to the CSV program output here. These numbers will gain relevance as we benchmark more NAS units with similar configuration.
The NFS share was also benchmarked in a similar manner with the following command:
IOZone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /nfs_test_mount/ -f /nfs_test_mount/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_NFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_NFS_CSV.csv
Some scenarios exhibit client caching effects, and these are evident in the gallery below.
The IOZone CSV output can be found here for those interested in the exact numbers.
A summary of the bandwidth numbers for various tests averaged across all file and record sizes is provided in the table below. As noted previously, some of these numbers are skewed by caching effects. A reference to the actual CSV outputs linked above make the entries affected by this effect obvious.
| WD My Cloud EX4 - Linux Client Performance (MBps) | ||
| IOZone Test | CIFS | NFS |
| Init Write | 40 | 18 |
| Re-Write | 40 | 19 |
| Read | 26 | 85 |
| Re-Read | 27 | 87 |
| Random Read | 12 | 33 |
| Random Write | 30 | 16 |
| Backward Read | 14 | 28 |
| Record Re-Write | 30 | 257 |
| Stride Read | 23 | 64 |
| File Write | 40 | 19 |
| File Re-Write | 40 | 18 |
| File Read | 17 | 59 |
| File Re-Read | 18 | 61 |
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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?