A CentOS 6.2 virtual machine was used to evaluate NFS and CIFS performance of the Netgear NV+ v2 and 2big 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 -o async,hard,proto=tcp,noac

mount -t cifs //NAS_IP/PATH_TO_SMB_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER -o directio

Note that we have not tried to optimize NFS performance for the NAS. In order to keep things as uniform as possible, we will just look at comparative performance on the basis of the default mounting options combined with the above (which are set to avoid caching effects on the client side). In this section, we benchmarked both the NAS units using IOMeter using the scripts available here. The graphs below presents the various results.

NFS Read Throughput [2x3TB - RAID 1] - Linux

NFS Write Throughput [2x3TB - RAID 1] - Linux

CIFS Read Throughput [2x3TB - RAID 1] - Linux

CIFS Write Throughput [2x3TB - RAID 1] - Linux

The LaCie unit appears to perform favorably in sequential accesses, while the DS211+ has a slight edge in the random transactions. The performance of the NV+ v2 is passable, though it doesn't have a top score in any of the tested configurations. RAIDiator 5.3.5 (ARM) seems to have left the door open for future performance enhancements.

Windows Performance: CIFS and iSCSI Final Words
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  • Zebble - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - link

    Netgear's ReadyNAS products in particular, dollar-for-dollar seem to always be a step behind Synology and QNAP. Synology has really got it figured out with a common firmware/featureset across all models, which is why I was surprised to read this article to find that all features are available across SPARC, x86 and now Netgear's ARM platform...

    Does the ReadyNAS make sense for anyone?
  • Zebble - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - link

    Correction: "all features are *not* available across SPARC, x86 and now Netgear's ARM platform..."
  • chadwickba2 - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - link

    A few months ago, I purchased the NETGEAR ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus and it is really nice. I have owned a Buffalo Linkstation Live, a Synology DS209+II, and several older external units and the unit I purchased blows them all away in performance. I have not owned a QSNAP, and it may be awesome. Synology products have very spotty performance in my experience. Synology does have the uniform upgrade and software down pat. Netgear is not even close on the software, but they are awesome in performance on my unit.
  • philipma1957 - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link

    I have the synology 210+ it is pretty good and support was good. but it cost more the 400. so if this is 250 it may be worth a look.
  • MrKane - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link

    Currently I'm operating a Synology 209+ and a Netgear Ultra 2.

    From my point of view the Netgear is acceptable" as a backup device, but as a more general server it is miles and miles behind Synology.

    The user interface for one is just ancient on the Netgear, even though it's a newer model with more CPU and more memory.

    The software on the Synology unit is way better. I'm running with it as a small LDAP server and connects Windows7, Mac and Linux clients to this. The media sharing sw on the Synology is by far more comfortable to use.

    The Readynas Ultra server is for me purely an rsync backup server for the Synology server. IT should be more capable, but as it is now it was chosen purly because it was a cheap solution.
  • Evadman - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link

    I have 3 NV+'s, and have always been impressed with their stability and the UI from a home user and a power user standpoint. Their throughput is slower than pretty much everything else I have tried, but for me the stability and ease of setup were worth the tradeoff. I should have waited for the price to come down (I paid $1100 for the first diskless unit, and they are $250ish now). I wish they made one that supported more disks (8 or more) so I could move off my 20 disk 3 TB RAID60 array on my server that I have most of my stuff on. The NV+ work awesomely for backup purposes now.

    In a nutshell, each has it's upsides and downsides, and you need to pick the one that fits your needs better.
  • Tim Thorpe - Saturday, July 28, 2012 - link

    I've had a readynas for about 5 years and couldn't be happier with it. Rarely have I had a problem with it, and when I did (I was unlucky enough to get one with a time bomb PSU) Netgear stood behind it out of warranty (Though it was a known issue). I'd gladly pick up a readyNAS again without hesitation though I was sad when inferant got bought by netgear.
  • vetu8 - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link

    nice post.

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