NETGEAR kicks loose Six-Bay SMB NASes

[corndog]

Oooh!

I finally decide to get the QNAP 509 and Netgear brings out this! I'm more interested in where this ReadyNAS Pro shows up on the NAS chart than any other NAS that has come out in ages.

After having tried quite a few NASes, I always get back to my "old faithful" ReadyNAS1100 - it's a bit slow by today's standards, but the interface works - always. It stays running for months at a time without problems. It has a PILE of capabilities, and they ALL work without problems.

The QNAP is close, but there are definite quirks. If I put a bunch of files on it using rsync and then try to access them via SMB, they're all (for some reason) tagged "System" and "Hidden". If I leave it running for a week, the web admin and ssh interfaces become inaccessible. I have to shut it down and restart it using the power button on the front panel. Sometimes files get duplicated via SMB because it mysteriously becomes case sensitive. My ReadyNAS never has these problems.

 

[iwod]

I am interested in this too.
I hope Smallnetbuilder could get to test this one out asap

 

[ChrisM]

Waiting with bated breath to see a comparison of this to the new Thecus 7 drive unit... I was surprised to see iSCSI support in the Netgear.

 

[thiggins]

Corndog: Interested, even at ~$2000?

 

[Unregistered]

$1700 is more like it for the 1.5tb version (including a 4th 500gb drive in an usb-enclosure).

see eaegis.com for more details.

 

[thiggins]

$1700 is more like it for the 1.5tb version (including a 4th 500gb drive in an usb-enclosure).

That's still a hefty hunk of change for home use.

 

[Dennis Wood]

For $2000 you can build one heck of a fast box with an 8 channel RAID controller, 4 port gigabit LAN, 7 drives ....

 

[corndog]

Corndog: Interested, even at ~$2000?

I have to admit that's a little steep for home. However, I also make lots of recommendations for a large number of small to medium businesses, and $2000 is not so bad for them...

My QNAP was the better part of $1000 and on top of that with 5 1TB drives, it was similar in price anyways...

 

[thiggins]

I have to admit that's a little steep for home. However, I also make lots of recommendations for a large number of small to medium businesses, and $2000 is not so bad for them...

I agree for business use. The Infrant/NETGEAR feature set has always been the best and most stable. Even puts products like Iomega's "business" stuff to shame.

They have been held back in performance, however, by sticking with the old Infrant processor. Looks like they finally broke out of that. With the Intel CPU, we should see performance similar or better than the TS509 Pro and other Intel M powered NASes....I hope!

Review unit should be on the way soon.

 

[OLBJAN]

I've had the ReadyNAS PRO for the last 3 months now and it's been an amazing piece of kit so far. Probably won't hit the 100MB/s mark using iozone (at least I didn't manage to hit that...) but I've seen my unit sustain 100+MB/s with parallel sequential reads for a few hours.

Stability also has not been an issue yet, Netgear really did a good job of putting these things together.

-Jan

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the report, Olbjan.

 

[beisser]

same goes for me actually that eaegis.com post was from me, i was just too lazy to register.

you can find a lot of benchmarks (using iometer and atto disk benchmark and drag & drop) at www.readynas.com/forum/

i have the pro for the same 3 months and it just plain kicks butt.

 

[wpns]

Be interesting to see the SNB review

But while Infrant was pretty good, Netgear support and firmware upgrades for the previous series has been atrocious, and I'm pulling ReadyNAS NV and NV+ devices _OUT_ of client sites, cuz they just don't do what they say they do (RAID-1 hot-swap has _NEVER_ worked), and I've been building Linux NAS machines on low-end Shuttle boxes with _three_ times the performance to replace them with.

OK, maybe they solved the performance problems with the new hardware, and I'm sure they promise to be more responsive in the future, but I've got way better things to do with my time than multiple repeated UNBILLABLE service calls to clients trying to support features that Infrant/Netgear claims works, but don't actually.

And $2K? Yowza. $650 for the driveless box was enough of a hard-sell, $2K is a nonstarter for my small business clients. I can build a 1TB NAS for something on the order of $4-500 that just works.

Did I mention that there are drive failure modes that will hang the box? What was the point of RAID again? No, not "really infrequent nearly-zero probability" failure modes, but things I've seen happen at least THREE times over the last few years. _YOU_ field a call from a client that you sold a $650 box plus $hundreds in drive, setup and configuration fees on the premise that it just always works and their business critical data will be safe, reliable, and online 24x7 when they show up in the morning and nothing works!

New ones that fix everything? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

 

[beisser]

Did I mention that there are drive failure modes that will hang the box? What was the point of RAID again? No, not "really infrequent nearly-zero probability" failure modes, but things I've seen happen at least THREE times over the last few years. _YOU_ field a call from a client that you sold a $650 box plus $hundreds in drive, setup and configuration fees on the premise that it just always works and their business critical data will be safe, reliable, and online 24x7 when they show up in the morning and nothing works!

those very same failure modes will hang you homegrown sata-nas-box as well i promise you that. raid is only for physical disk failure.. if wont protect against a partly working drive electronics or similar errors where the controller thinks the drive is working but in reality it isnt.

if you want to avoid that you have to invest in something that doesnt use cheap run of the mill sata-drives...

but sure go on bashing netgear for something that has nothing to do with netgear

 

[beq]

Waiting with bated breath to see a comparison of this to the new Thecus 7 drive unit...

Me too! I really want to wait for Tim's definitive reviews before buying another NAS.

It's too bad the 6-bay ReadyNAS Pro is so much more expensive than the $1100 7-bay Thecus N7700 (much less the $850 QNAP TS-509 Pro and $1000 Synology DS508 5-bay products).

There have been many gripes on the ReadyNAS Pro price in the Infrant forum, even after they announced a "Pro Pioneer" diskless model with a lower (but still undetermined) price and less features than the "Pro Business". Namely the Pioneer doesn't support standard RAID 0/1/5/6 (only X-RAID2), snapshot, Active Directory, etc.

I'm guessing the Thecus N7700 will be faster than the TS-509 (which in turn is a bit faster than the DS508). Which might make the N7700's $1100 MSRP reasonable given the 7 drive bays. Then again Thecus' user interface is definitely more spartan than the QNAP and especially the Synology. Also let's not forget that the Thecus N5200PRO had doubled the CPU speed and RAM compared to the original N5200, yet retained about the same performance.

I wonder if the ReadyNAS Pro is significantly faster than all the rest, to justify its price (at least for the Pioneer model)? Will Tim's review really find ~ 100MB/sec read/write across the whole 32M - 1G file size range, in both RAID5/6 and X-RAID2? X-RAID2's vertical capacity expansion is interesting and comes a bit closer to the Drobo's versatility.

And as has been said the ReadyNAS in general comes with a great and stable featureset (although it still lacks a built-in file manager, IP camera recording, and some other things).

 

[thiggins]

It's too bad the 6-bay ReadyNAS Pro is so much more expensive than the $1100 7-bay Thecus N7700 (much less the $850 QNAP TS-509 Pro and $1000 Synology DS508 5-bay products).

Keep in mind you're comparing diskful vs. diskless. But even with drives, Netgear is charging a hefty premium.

Will Tim's review really find ~ 100MB/sec read/write across the whole 32M - 1G file size range, in both RAID5/6 and X-RAID2?

I'd look at the QNAP TS509 PRO and Sans Digital MN4L+ performance as an indicator of what the ReadyNAS Pro will do.
I'll be sure, BTW, to test past 1 GB this time!

 

[wpns]

Failure modes

those very same failure modes will hang you homegrown sata-nas-box as well i promise you that.

Sure, any driver that doesn't incorporate some kind of timeout is going to hang, doesn't mean NetGear did it right.

But you go ahead and buy them, I'm just pointing out that RAID doesn't mean what you think it means, and using the ReadyNAS won't mean your data is always accessible.

 

[beisser]

Sure, any driver that doesn't incorporate some kind of timeout is going to hang, doesn't mean NetGear did it right.

But you go ahead and buy them, I'm just pointing out that RAID doesn't mean what you think it means, and using the ReadyNAS won't mean your data is always accessible.

i already have it. as a matter of fact i betatested it. and raid NEVER means your data is safe. whoever thinks raid removes the need for a backup is retarded.

 

[beq]

I'd look at the QNAP TS509 PRO and Sans Digital MN4L+ performance as an indicator of what the ReadyNAS Pro will do.

Wow really? Just matching the TS509 PRO that would be kind of disappointing given the much higher price level of the ReadyNAS Pro Business. Netgear/Infrant has said the Pro Pioneer diskless model will have a lower price, but they haven't said what that price is yet, and I have a feeling it will still be more expensive than the Thecus/QNAP/Synology top-end models.

BTW do we know exactly which Intel Core 2 Duo CPU the ReadyNAS Pro uses?

 

[thiggins]

BTW do we know exactly which Intel Core 2 Duo CPU the ReadyNAS Pro uses?

My apologies. I missed that in the Netgear spec.
I take back my comment about the QNAP TS509 PRO and Sans Digital MN4L+ being indicative of the ReadyNAS Pro performance. They use entirely different CPUs.