QNAP TS-659 vs Synology DS1010+ Benchmarking Oddity

[convergent]

I am looking to buy a new NAS after a near death of my data on a four year old ReadyNAS NV+ that has served me well. The NV+ had a drive start to go bad and it took me a lot of time and frustration to get things back in order. The NV+ would go non-reponsive to the network or the power button after about an hour, and then it also wouldn't boot without intervention... all because a drive was "going" bad. Making matters worse, my USB backup was in ext3 format which made it impossible for me to easily continue to use my data while fixing the NV+. My choice of ext3 with the NV+ for backup was because of the horrible performance of backing up to FAT or NTFS on the NV+. So I've decided I want a newer, faster NAS that gives me better opportunity for quick recovery, and less "proprietary" issues to deal with. I went back to Eaegis.com where I bought the NV+ four years ago to get some advice, and after a long discussion we are down to the QNAP TS-659 as the recommendation, and then use the NV+ as my backup machine (along with supplementing some USB or eSATA backup drives if needed).

I work from home in a technology job, and also have a small business doing professional photography and web related things. I use the NAS to house all my image masters and also backup my Lightroom image libraries (unfortunately they can't run from a NAS well). I also use the NAS to house music and ripped DVDs to access for media streaming and want to expand that a bit, as well as host converted VHS home movies eventually. Finally, I have an Apple Time Capsule that I could possibly consolidate into the NAS and then have everything in one place, although that is a double edged sword if I'm not backing it up well.

So the feature set of the TS-659 looks great, as does the TS-459 which I'm also considering... but like the idea of growth options. The only thing that is concerning me is I've started looking at the much cheaper Synology DS1010+ benchmarks and I'd expect them to be closer in performance given they are using roughly the same hardware. The TS-659/459 is very close to the DS1010+ in Write performance, but it lags quite a bit on Read performance. That doesn't make sense to me given they are using the same architecture. I assume this has to do with the RAID5 code efficiency in the firmware between Synology and QNAP and wonder if this is likely to improve with successive firmware updates? Its also surprising given that QNAP has a much longer run with the Intel processors that are used in both.

So I'm questioning why I should pay about $150-200 more for the QNAP to get one extra bay, while also seeing a decrease in performance. Other than performance I do like just about everything else about the QNAP better from my couple of days of looking.

One other thing I think I read on this... can the Synology do rsync? If not, then what would be the best way to backup the DS1010+ to my old NV+ for incremental nightly backups of all my shares?

I'm also thinking about possibly using iSCSI... I read that you can't do anything on the QNAP to backup the iSCSI data while its mounted by a computer on the network... so that wouldn't really work well for what I was thinking... allowing my networked computers to use iSCSI for data, and then easily back it all up for disaster recovery from the NAS.

Bottom line is the QNAP-659 with 3x2G drives is going to run me $1637, which is way more than I wanted to spend at this point on a NAS, but it should position me to be set for the next several years with only incremental drives being added. That said, the QNAP-459 would get me to the same point for about $300 less... and only give me one empty bay, but the storage provide would be twice what I am actually using today. Decisions, decisions.

 

[Lalato]

I'm fairly new to all this myself. The only question I can answer is about rsync. According to the Synology website, the DS1010+ supports rsync right out of the box...

http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS1010+/index.php

 

[convergent]

I guess I misread the SmallNetBuilder charts because looking at them again, I am seeing that the Synology and QNAP boxes discussed here both have about a 10-15% slower Read performance than they do for Write with RAID 5. That doesn't make any sense to me, but I guess it is what it is. They are both really great performers and I like the QNAP features and such better, so I'm going to go that route... need to decide on 4 vs. 6 bay which is putting my brain into overdrive.

 

[alex_g]

[..] I am seeing that the Synology and QNAP boxes discussed here both have about a 10-15% slower Read performance than they do for Write with RAID 5. That doesn't make any sense to me, but I guess it is what it is.

You should keep in mind, that Reading is always happening physically, so when testing with sequential files there isn't any caching involved. The test will always finish no sooner than when all files are delivered to the PC which is running the benchmark.

On Writes instead, it's the other way around! Even if the files are big enough to NOT fit entirely into the NAS'es DRAM buffer, there is always a bit of caching involved (provided the NAS uses write-back caching, and most NASes do). Let's say that the NAS uses half of it's 1GB memory as write cache, then the first 512MB of write transfer will always be transferred at full GBit LAN speed while the buffer is being filled. At the same time the hard disks begin to write the data. The benchmark however will already finish, as soon as it has pumped the last single bit into the cache of the NAS (while 512megs of data actually still need to be written).

If you would keep on writing "forever", this speed-up effect during the last 512MB will slowly get negligible, but if the test is limitted to only a few gigabytes that could very well be the reason for measuring higher write than read speeds...

 

[convergent]

I have decided to go with the QNAP TS-659. The conclusion I have come to is that there really isn't a bad choice here as they are both excellent NASes. One thing adding to my decision is that I have had great support on my ReadyNAS NV+ that I bought from Eaegis and they don't sell Synology... but do sell QNAP. They just helped me resolve a problem with my ReadyNAS NV+ several years after I bought it from them... with a phone conversation and some suggestions that I didn't find elsewhere, and that ultimately solved my problem.