Share your successful ReadyNAS hardware setup

Thought I'd take a ReadyNAS family portrait :lol: since I briefly had them all in one location...



Much has changed since my last visio diagram.

fbmachines wrote:
Thought I'd take a ReadyNAS family portrait :lol: since I briefly had them all in one location...

And that location is what I like to call "Heaven"! Sweet setup, FBM. 8)

dbott67 wrote:
And that location is what I like to call "Heaven"! Sweet setup, FBM. 8)

Haha, thanks. I'm afraid to go look at my eletrical meter though as the numbers are probably climbing at an astronomical rate. I'll probably blame it on the AC if the wife asks... :rofl:

Copper 100/100 from the wall
Dell PowerConnect 2724 (vLAN1)
Smoothwall P4 512MB ram, D-Link DFE-570TX.

Dell PowerConnect 2724 (vLAN2)
A few PC's on the network, wont list hardware, since they change regularly, and honestly, any PC should be expected to work with the NAS.
D-Link DGS-1008D
ReadyNas NV+ (4x ST2000VX002-1AH166, 2TB drives, X-Raid.)
LG 42LX650N
XboX (Yeah, the real one. The old one)
Amiga A1200

Dell PowerConnect 2724 (vLAN3)
Wireless. Phone, laptops, visitors, and neighbors who freeload. Generally locked from accessing the internal network by the SmoothWall. Temporary access granted on MAC.

vLAN1 is simply "the outside" so i can hook up more then the SmoothWall system there. vLAN2/3 is green and orange zones on the SmoothWall system. My main use for the NV+ is simply entertainment, so i stuck the D-Link switch on the green part of the SmoothWall net, and stuck the Telly, XboX, Amiga and left a few cables for visitors who want to go by wire, over at that entertainment end of the living-room. The rest should be self-explainatory. If not, ask.
B!

I've been using a ReadyNAS Duo for a month or two with a couple of Seagate 2TB "Green" drives in Raid1.

Here is my setup (which is currently working flawlessly):



Here is my Command and Control PC (not that anyone cares):



The router, PCs and Hub are gigabit. Both NASs are supposedly Gigabit but we all know they won't run anywhere near true Gigabit speed. The Western Digital NAS crawls even though it says "Gigabit Compatible", but I'm getting a read of about 42MB/s and 18MB/s write from the ReadyNAS which is pretty decent. (I get the same speeds when connected through the router or the hub).

I gotta say though I was so disappointed in the speeds of any NAS around the $200 mark (I've tested four different NASs not including the crappy WD NAS I have) that I almost skipped buying one completely in favor of using another PC just as a NAS since it will give you 60MB/s over a Gigabit LAN from PC to PC. I didn't because I just wanted something more compact. If I had spare room in a closet or something I might have gone with an old PC with a software RAID running Linux and a Gigabit PCI card.

I think these NAS manufacturers have a responsibility to put the actual transfer rates of their products right on the box, and in the information page for the product on their website, and right with the rest of the specs in the manual. None of this "Gigabit Compatible" crap, but actual transfer rates. It's like they go out of their way not to say what the transfer rates should be in ideal conditions. Even in the FAQ, when questions ask directly about performance and transfer speeds they skirt around the issue with "oh well, that depends on your system and o/s and drives and blah blah blah" when the fact is a Gigabit network device should be able to max out the network.

Only in one FAQ did they give transfer rates, and that was for a ReadyNAS NV, which they say does 30MB/s read and 24MB/s write which, again, is even less than USB 2.0 speeds. I don't see any point to purchasing a NAS that cannot exceed USB 2.0 speeds since I could just add another external USB 2.0 drive and share it over my network.

That's an awful lot of documentation I had to go through before I realized I wasn't going to find the transfer rates and I would have to test it myself. (I was looking for the information while I was in the store using one of their computers to access the Netgear and ReadyNAS websites trying to find out if I should try this NAS or not). All the other companies seemed to pull the same trick of avoiding transfer rates like the plague. Some of them would not exceed 100 Mb/s speeds yet touted Gigabit compatibility all over their packaging. I was tempted to fire off an email to Consumer Affairs Canada complaining about the misleading information on some of the products.

As I said, transferring from PC to PC always gives 60MB/s because the PCs and hard drives are faster than the network is. Most ~ $200 NASs that I tested get very poor transfer rates. This ReadyNAS Duo at least goes 5-10 MB/s over USB 2.0 when reading.

Anyway, that's my setup and my rant to go along with it. I guess I'm a little ticked because it took a week of testing different NASs before I found one in my price range that had what I think is half decent performance.

Just wanted to post some of my setup info for those that might want to use a variation of it:

ReadyNAS NVX, Pro, and 2100's in use here for various clients. Our office is the off-site location. We use RSync to copy back the data on a scheduled basis (pushed from the client site). Most sites push every 1-4 hours with staggered start times after business hours and we have both a FiOS and Comcast providers, and split the load between the lines. The more frequent backup events help to deal with internet hiccups and catching up from bigger backups. We are currently looking to use Acronis Storage Note (with de-dupe) with push to a second storage node method to replace RSYNC - to reduce the amount of data needed to be sent over the Internet links. Currently in consultation with Acronis at this time to get it working - Node communications in Acronis is not working yet.

Notifications: We use a g-mail account to relay messages to our helpdesk alert mailbox. We found that using the client onsite mail server variations were less than reliable due to server firewalls, server versions (or none onsite) and relay restrictions, and the human factor. This also method gives us a reliable record of events, and the only additional programming might be for the site firewall to allow the ReadyNAS to contact gmail on it's special port (normally no issue).

APC SNMP power shutdowns: Using the Monitor UPS over SNP option under System / Power (scroll down), insert the IP address of the UPS, and make sure that one of the available SNMP community names is set for 'public' and is enabled for read access on the UPS. This is not for USB setup. Current APC firmwares needed to see that option in the GUI and have the option in the ReadyNAS. We are using the newer AP9617/18/19 or AP9630/31 series cards, but you might have luck with the 9605/6 SNMP or Web cards if you can find the old APC FTP site and push the last firmware pairs they made for them (distant memory recalls .AOT and .SUX files for the SmartUPS or older Matrix series and TFTP uploads). A note that I have a distaste for APC (Schneider Electric) serial/USB setups (designed for single system communications - maybe in a home?). I prefer using the open-source APCUPSD in place of APC's offering on my Windows and Linux servers.

Initial seeding of the RSync is done via bringing the remote to the site, and running a backup job, then bringing it back and adjusting the addressing on the backup job. We use Sonicwall firewalls for the most part, and that lets us do some NAT/PAT on the RSYNC communications ports so we don't need more than a single IP on the public side.

I also make use of the ntp.org time servers for time keeping (they are load-balanced, and may be closer depending on which one you use in your country/region - see ntp.org). I set the timezones correctly for accurate logs. I disable unneeded services (more than RSYNC and maybe SMB is rare on the back end) so there is no exposed accesses, protocol yapping on the LAN, and also change the default passwords, set up a login for local access, update the SSL certificates for the final IP for the unit. And write everything down before you forget it 20 minutes later.

Mergatroid wrote:
As I said, transferring from PC to PC always gives 60MB/s because the PCs and hard drives are faster than the network is.

Um, most drives aren't faster then the network in real life applications, even tho theoretical numbers say they should be well past the network in performance. The reason to why this is true, might not belong in this thread tho. Max speeds on a TCP transfer is in the area of 114MB/s, and UDP, 116MB/s, but neither your drives, or your CPU/NIC/motherboard can handle the transfers.

Mergatroid wrote:
Most ~ $200 NASs that I tested get very poor transfer rates.

For the same amount of money you get a old P4, which in a few years will have cost you a fair bit more in power then a $200 NAS. There is a simple reason for why they perform as they do. Some of it is to be cheap to build and sell, or nobody would buy one and put at home, but mainly, it's due to the simple fact that home users most the time don't really need gigabit performance, and a cheap electricity bill is a better goal, then a blazing fast experience that you'll only care about 5 times a year. If speeds are a concern, you build a PC based system, or buy a "real" NAS, and not something targeted at the small home office, or end user.

Do i agree with you, in that it's sad that my NV+ isn't at least maxing out in reads what my single internal drive can write? Sure. On the other hand i knew this was the case when i bought my drives, so i bought slower drives, with the low power use in mind. And 5 year warranty. By the time it's out of warranty, and "to slow" to be useful, a new unit will have better performance at a similar price. And hopefully, i can still use the drives...
B!

The bottlenecks in storage like this are:
1. CPU overhead processing the IP stack at the NIC(s)
2. The RAM available as a cache to the above input stream
3. The CPU overhead in managing the file system and reading/writing to the disk channels.
4. The CPU overhead in hashing the data for RAID operations for reading/writing
5. The number of spindles and media data rates on the drives (drive on-board cache to media transfer speeds)

#1 is improved by offloading the CPU processing of various redundant tasks - high end NICs for servers do this, at a dollar cost.
#2 is improved by adding memory, at cost, with benefits to writes-to-NAS only, up to a point of the largest files it can cache.
#3 is improved by DMA Host bus controllers doing the read/write processing from memory. The CPU still does the file system, and so a dual CPU host is a good solution if much of the IP Stack and downstream RAID is also being processed by the CPU.
#4 Hardware RAID read/write processing on a host bus adapter is faster than having the system CPU do it in a multitasking OS. RAID rebuild is also more efficient. A battery-backed write cache module is more expensive than a read-cache-only RAID controller, and both are more expensive than doing it in main system RAM with the general purpose CPU...
#5 More disk spindles (smaller data chunks spread across more targets, transferred theoretically in parallel), higher spindle speeds (implying higher head<->platter data transfers) equals better performance if all the electronics upstream are up to the overall task.

There are many variables in the calculation, hence the tendency not to quote speeds - right now (Fall 2011), there is a shortage of hard disks due to parts made in China where factories were destroyed by various natural disasters recently. A change of memory type, hard disk maker, or other part in this could affect the overall performance, if not the price point for profitability of the model.

Hardware:

NAS 1: ReadyNAS DUO : 1024 MB RAM : 2 x 1,500 GB WD : Raidiator 4.1.8
EX 2: Fantec 4 Bay Box 4 x 1000 GB WD x2 Hitachi x2 USB,eSata
EX 3: Level One WAP-008-300GB
Router: 1:Netgear DGN3500 WiFi N, RJ-Gigabit
2:Pirelli PRGAV 4202 WiFi N, RJ-Gigabit

Laptop: Intel i3 4x 2,3Ghz : 4000 MB RAM : WiFi N, RJ-Gigabit Win 7 32Bit 320GB Ati 5470 512Mb, Intel 2000MB

Media Player: FullHD Media Recorder & Player MR1210 HDMI 1.3a, SD/MMC/MMS Lesegerät, CHILI
Others: HTC 7 Trophy, Samsung Galaxy Ace, HP iPaq, WiFi CAM 8x FOSCAM FI8918W

Internet Connection: 8 Mbps Down / 768 kbps UP ADSL

(Not enough space)

Here's my setup

The ReadyNAS does SMB, DLNA and FTP