New Performance Numbers, ReadyNAS PRO

[Dennis Wood]

I've been foiled in my attempts to test the READYNAS PRO with 2TB WD Black (7200rpm) drives by the latest and pretty buggy firmware 4.2.7 (Don't update to this!!!). These drives are not on the HCL list btw. With the NAS unit finally rebuilt to 4.2.5, and the new drives installed as X-RAID, here are a few preliminary numbers. The test workstation is a Vista SP2 64bit (RAID0) workstation with 3x500GB drives in RAID0, 8GB RAM. It's using an older ASUS motherboard with dual Marvel NICs, connected to an HP Procurve 1800-24G switch. Both workstation and NAS are running 802.3ad link aggregation (2 NICS each).

Write speeds (drag and drop) on a 36GB file = 99MB/s
Read speeds (drag and drop) on a 36GB file = 104MB/s

I believe these are the highest numbers I've seen in testing here...more to come.

 

[claykin]

With the NAS unit finally rebuilt to 4.2.5, and the new drives installed as X-RAID......

Does "new drives" = the 2TB WD Black disks? Just want to be certain you got it up and running using these disks. If so, I highly recommend you report this to Netgear support so they can see why they "lost" support for these disks in the V4.2.7 revision.

You can PM yoh-dah or chirpa on the forum with links to your story here and on the Readynas forum.

In the release notes for V4.2.7 there is mention of a workaround added to support the WD RE4 disks. Maybe this workaround is responsible for the incompatibility you are seeing. Just a guess....

 

[Dennis Wood]

Clay, I did indeed get a few emails (and responded) from the NG folks on that issue.

Those numbers are from 4.2.5 using the 2TB WD Black drives. So far, zero issues with shares, performance or otherwise with 4.2.5 restored. So we'll leave things there for a bit.

Cheers,
Dennis.

 

[claykin]

Good to hear. I saw Grievous (Jedi) posted a message for you on the Readynas forums.

Hopefully they'll get this all fixed up for V4.2.? so your next upgrade will be smoooooth as silk.

 

[Dennis Wood]

"Smooth as silk" and "software update" are risky things to put in the same sentence! It's a reminder that really, you need to have a complete backup before doing bios/driver/code updates etc. We tend to apply updates because usually they resolve bugs and improve performance..but this episode demonstrates that this is not always the case.

Cheers,
Dennis.