Readynas OS 6 Massive Performance Decrease

how did you have 110MB/s on your ultra4 with 4.2 ? SMB/CIFS or FTP ? (with my ultra4, i get 40MB/s with smb, with only 30% cpu, but with ftp, i cap at 110MB/s, like you)

Not sure to be honest - definitely using SMB to achieve those speeds (windows). Nothing I can really say that makes my setup unique...

[quote="StephenB"Opinions of course vary. I've been happy with mine.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/west ... he-premium did a pretty good test. [/quote]

Interesting article, but I didn't see anything other than configurable TLER, advanced vibration (that many drives support). I think that anyone recommending them as better than other drives (that have configurable TLER) is branding persuasion. I've used WD drives in AMD softraid, and if along TLER they do drop out. But performance, any everything else, is just the same.

There's no rocket science in WD Red, that's all I'm saying - and I'd be sad if people swapped out their drives thinking otherwise. If I need a new drive, I'd be happy to buy them - the price premium for the extended warranty is a no-brainer!

IMHO.

Back to the main topic - I can only think of 3 reasons for the slowdown:
1. Memory issues - using swap
2. Protocol problems, but then I'm guessing it's uses standard Linux implementations
3. Other processes interrupting, perhaps the relevant processes need to be less nice, or the scheduling has changed
4. Something else :D

ihartley wrote:
There's no rocket science in WD Red, that's all I'm saying... If I need a new drive, I'd be happy to buy them - the price premium for the extended warranty is a no-brainer!

We agree. I buy them because of the warranty, and because WDC will support (e.g, recommends them for NAS use) - which is not the case for some other WDC drives.

There is no rocket science, but a solid drive with settings appropriate for NAS use.

ihartley wrote:
Back to the main topic - I can only think of 3 reasons for the slowdown: 1. Memory issues - using swap 2. Protocol problems, but then I'm guessing it's uses standard Linux implementations 3. Other processes interrupting, perhaps the relevant processes need to be less nice, or the scheduling has changed 4. Something else :D

There shouldn't be a problem with memory - I actually upgraded the unit to a 2GB ram chip (of course, still receiving the same speeds with the 1GB chip - tested just in case).
I have found after doing some checking that 2 of my Green's have ~500,000 LCC thanks to me forgetting to adjust the idle timer. I'm guessing this could be the cause of the clicks, not sure if it's causing the speed issue.

I also did some more research on the Red drives - which apparently offer a URE of 10^14. Which is also bad for raid recovery.

Unfortunately, the only other good option it seems (ignorant of other brands) is the RE4... which is far outside my price range ($350 per 3TB 64M cache drive here).

hando wrote:
I also did some more research on the Red drives - which apparently offer a URE of 10^14...

You won't find any consumer-grade drives with a better URE spec. You need to move up to enterprise class if you need 10^15 spec - which of course sell at a price premium.

Replaced the green's with new 3TB reds.

Performance still terrible - the device is capable of much faster speeds - yet is now unable to reach anywhere near it's potential.
I hope NTGR do something about this - for a core part of NAS functionality it should be a high priority.

hando wrote:
Replaced the green's with new 3TB reds. Performance still terrible - the device is capable of much faster speeds...

I guess I'm not surprised that the reds didn't improve performance.

Hopefully Netgear will spend some cycles on optimizing.

ihartley wrote:

StephenB wrote: Opinions of course vary. I've been happy with mine. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/west ... he-premium did a pretty good test. Interesting article, but I didn't see anything other than configurable TLER, advanced vibration (that many drives support). I think that anyone recommending them as better than other drives (that have configurable TLER) is branding persuasion. I've used WD drives in AMD softraid, and if along TLER they do drop out. But performance, any everything else, is just the same. There's no rocket science in WD Red, that's all I'm saying - and I'd be sad if people swapped out their drives thinking otherwise. If I need a new drive, I'd be happy to buy them - the price premium for the extended warranty is a no-brainer! IMHO.

Hi,

I recently attended a Synology roadshow (of all things) and they also had a senior WD engineer as one of the extra speakers.
The guy had been at WD since it opened and ran one of the the teams that handled drive firmware.
We had a chat after the presentation and I asked him the same thing - what made WD RED better than their WB Black drives.

Answer was they used the some of the same drive mechanism from the RE4 with a modified firmware based off the WD Black.
The controller is smaller than the RE4 hence the used the WD Black controller with some modifications.
Most important one being TLER along with better jitter control etc…
He could have been talking crap, but after listening to marketingdroids, he new what he was taking about.

On another note: Was really impressed at how fast all the NAS manufacturers qualified the WD REDs for use in their NAS devices.
Normally it takes ages. This was the first time I have ever seen virtually all the players support it close to launch date.

PS: I do alot of work with video these days on big RAIDs and SANs - these ALL use HGST so am not a WD fan usually.