Netgear ReadyNAS 716 Review: 10GBase-T in a Desktop NAS
by Ganesh T S on January 1, 2014 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Enterprise
- NAS
- NetGear
- 10G Ethernet
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words
The Netgear ReadyNAS 716 is a 6-bay NAS, and there are many 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 (OCZ Vector 4 120 GB) 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.
| Netgear ReadyNAS 716 RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Idle | 24.23 W | |
| 120 GB Single Disk X-RAID2 Initialization | 28.12 W | |
| 120 GB RAID-0 to 120 GB RAID-1 (1 to 2 Disks) | 17m 09s | 32.46 W |
| 120 GB RAID-1 to 240 GB RAID-5 (2 to 3 Disks) | 33m 03s | 34.70 W |
| 240 GB RAID-5 to 360 GB RAID-5 (3 to 4 Disks) | 31m 46s | 37.35 W |
| 360 GB RAID-5 to 480 GB RAID-5 (4 to 5 Disks) | 34m 04s | 39.45 W |
| 480 GB RAID-5 to 600 GB RAID-5 (5 to 6 Disks) | 35m 09s | 41.08 W |
| 600 GB RAID-5 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 6 Disks) | 31m 02s | 40.56 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, the ReadyNAS 716 is a bold product from Netgear. While ReadyNAS OS 6 needs further work to achieve feature parity with the competition (more apps, SMB features such as SSD caching etc.), Netgear must be appreciated for making an attempt to bring 10-GbE capabilities to the desktop NAS form factor. Additionally, the choice of 10GBase-T makes the product even more ground-breaking.
For SMBs making their first foray into 10-GbE, the use of backward compatible 10GBase-T equipment is a big plus. Netgear has affordable 10GBase-T switches in the XS series (the 12-port XS712T and the 8-port XS708E). Introducing a 10GBase-T NAS at south of $3000 also serves Netgear well in terms of expanding the addressable market for those switches. All in all, the Netgear ReadyNAS 716 is an impressive and revolutionary product. The market for 10G equipment outside of a server rack is currently limited. However, we believe that the ReadyNAS 716 is just the start of many more good things to come in terms of affordable 10-GbE equipment outside the datacenter space.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
24 Comments
View All Comments
Guspaz - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Yikes, that's a highly questionable decision, to go with btrfs instead of ZFS as the default file system. ZFS has been in production use for seven years now, proven through widespread deployments and available on every *nix platform you can think of, while btrfs is still beta quality (without even an official stable release) and nowhere near feature-competitive with ZFS...JDG1980 - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Agreed. This is a full-fledged Xeon PC with ECC RAM, so why not go with ZFS? It would seem to be the obvious choice for a high-quality, time-tested software RAID system.By the way, it would really be better if you listed the suggested retail price on the first page of reviews along with the other specs. (A quick Google search seems to indicate that the street price is $2500-$3000.)
Runiteshark - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Probably because it takes a bit more effort to get ZFS running in Linux than btrfs, but not that much. It recently went stable and is working just fine on a 72 bay Supermicro chassis I have in test for the past 3 months. All this being said, why didn't they just go with a BSD solution?nafhan - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
While, BTRFS has been supported as a root file system in SLE and Oracle Linux since 2012. ZFS: not available from the vendor on either (even though Solaris is owned by Oracle). That's probably it right there.shodanshok - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
I agree. While BTRFS is quite stable now, considering the critical role assigned to a filesystem I would go with a FS with a proven track record (and fsck). Moreover being a CoW filesystem, BTRFS tend to be extremely fragmentation prone in some circumstances, basically everytime a file rewrite is required, for example a database or a virtual machine (but I think that a similar NAS units is primarily assigned with archiving role).SirGCal - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Yup, I have two 8-disk systems myself. One running hardware LSI controller for RAID 6 and one using ZFS for the same effective protection. Sure the hardware controller is actually a tiny bit faster at hard reads, but for the $600 price tag, so what. All of my current systems are going to be ZFS. These arrays in a box are interesting until they decide to go with some other pooling system... If there is a real comparable reason and argument for BTRFS instead of ZFS, I'd like to see it.Runiteshark - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
I tested btrfs recently with a large disk array (read 45 4TB drives) and the performance was very poor. Ended up going with JFS and shunned XFS because it's not stable in the event of power issues.shodanshok - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Hi,from my understanding JFS and JFS2 are more or less unsupported from some time now.
What problem did you have with XFS? It is designed to manage the exact case you describe: a lot of space spread over a lot of spinning disks. When using XFS, the only two thing that can lead to data loss are:
1. no barrier/FUA support in the disk/controller combo
2. an application that rewrite files with truncate and do _not_ use fsyncs
Case n.1 is common to all filesystem: if your disk lies about cache flush, then no filesystem can save you. The only thing that can somewhat lessen the risk is journal checksumming, that is implemented in both XFS, EXT4 and BRTFS, but I don't know about JFS.
Case n.2 is really an application shortcoming, but EXT4 and BTRFS choice here are the more sensible one: detect such corner case and apply a work-around. Anyway, with application the properly use fsync, XFS is rock stable.
Regards.
Runiteshark - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
On one hand, I'm happy that 10g is becoming more prevalent slowly for the con/prosumer grade market, however products like this make my head hurt. The performance that you were able to get out of this host were nothing short of embarrassing, and could of easily been handled by a single gigabit link. I think this primarly stems from vendors still using software RAID without using good quality HBAs. You can most certainly have a fantastic software solution that is high performance without a real RAID controller or even a high end HBA, however it requires you use ceph, or ZFS.The performance you are seeing out of this is actually very similar to a HP Microserver that I have running on FreeNAS with 2GB of ram, LAGG gigabit ports, 4x4TB 7200rpm Seagates + 32GB USB3 OS drive, granted the entire unit cost no more than $1800, and only has 4 slots instead of 6. Without a doubt if I was going to build something bigger, I'd use a Supermicro X9DR7-TF+, same as what I use in production for $800, get a decent chassis, the LSI BBU and have support for up to 16 drives with 2 10G ports with an Intel X540 chipset, which all toghether would still be significantly less than this solution, and obviously blow the performance of this out of the water.
hpglow - Wednesday, January 1, 2014 - link
Runiteshark not good at reading or convertng bits to bytes? With some of the tests pushing over 600 MB/sec a 1G ethernet port would be saturated more than 4 times over not including packet overhead. A 1Gb ethernet port is good for only 125 MB/sec.