RN104 vs NV+V2 read performance and disk storage variance

The RN104 should give you more than that, I've seen mine up to 95MB/s in read and 45MB/s in write. I tested it on wifi at 53MB/s no later than today.

Do you have antivirus, encryption or checksum enabled ? Did you defragment ? How much space have you left ? Do you have add ons enabled ? Is it rebuilding the array ?
Size on disk could be a difference in the block size for the partition. it is 4096 for the ext4 root partition on my 104, but I couldn't get the result for the data partition, if those are different then you may have wasted space due to a larger block size.

Have you tried turning off snapshots and Genie Apps?

Thanks xeltros.

I agree that RN104 should perform better. I was thinking the reason for the slower performance was due to my using the 5900 RPM drives instead of the 7200RPM on the NV+V2. I have had some challenges with those faster drives so hoping the 5900 rpm NAS drives will last me longer.

I did not enable antivirus. No add-ons. not sure where to check whether encryption was enabled. The array completed yesterday and did take much longer than the NV+v2. Of course, this RN104 has 4 x 4TB, and the the other was with 4x3TB so I'll expect that it takes more time.

Now, as for the block size for the partition, I am curious where to tune that. There were no options on the web admin interface. However, I guess it is possible to log into the system via root and configure things, but i am not yet prepared to do that at this time. my share contains a lot of scanned photos ranging from few hundred kilobytes, to the recent photos that are in the order of 3-4MB. Some large home videos from my old camcorder from trips years ago, but those are in the few GB range. I wonder if the block size of say 4kb is generally smaller than the files that are in the hundred kbs/mb/gbs, how it contributes to much more wasted space. There was no place i found that allowed me to specify any disk or partition block sizes.

It would be good if we were able to create multiple logical volumes that we might store large videos vs smaller pictures and have the ability to tune block sizes according to the type of files in the volumes.

The 4 x 4TB drives with RAID5 is giving me around 10.08TB remaining free.

Dyv.

Hi mdgm,

Yes, I turned off the snapshots on the shares by un-checking the continuous protection for each of the folders under "data". Not sure if there is a more global setting elsewhere.

I do not have any genie apps running or installed but I am very tempted to experiment with some of the apps. Having seen some of the challenges with apps causing problems, i will wait a bit longer before trying new apps.

I meant turning off the Genie+ Marketplace service. I see you have that running. It is under System > Settings > Services.

Hi mdgm,

I just noticed that as well and turned the Genie+Marketplace service off. So now I have SMB, ReadyDLNA, UPnP, HTTP, HTTPS. Everything else is off.

is HTTP/HTTPS required for the web admin access? I am afraid to turn that off.

dyv.

I'm using ST4000VN000 * 4 on mine, also 5900 rpm. 7200RPM drives run faster but use more power and generate more heat and probably more vibration that could cause them to fail at an increase rate. Choosing NAS certified disks (WD red or seagate NAS HDD for example) that are on the Netgear HCL is the best way to avoid problems. Both manufacturers seem to have many satisfied consumers on those models.
Anyway, my disks go up to 180Mb/s (according to seagate, so count 130Mb/s ;)) each, so if the NAS was fast enough I should have at least 3 times that value (admitting that the 4th disk is only for data safety, not used for transfer). The fact is the RN104 CPU is weak, not able to cope with that. The gigabit network would limit me afterwards anyway.

I don't think you can tune the block size without recreating the partition (not sure). I'm not an expert on that subject but I think bock size is often determined according to the space you desire to address. The block size is meant to store files in small containers where the OS can easily retrieve them. if you set the container to a minimum your OS will have trouble maintaining the address database (or addressing the whole disk), if you containers are too big then you will lose space because you will "reserve" space but only use a part of it (if you have a block size of 4k with a 129k file, you'll use 32 blocks entirely and 1/4 of another, you lose 3k, with a 64k block size, you use 2 blocks entirely and 1/64 another, you lose 63K. Repeat for many files).
More over I think Netgear works with BTRFS guys to optimise the performance too, there may be some performance tuning in the choices Netgear made for the filesystem, recreating it with the wrong options can be a problem to that regard. Not to mention something like this is very likely yo make you lose support (unless you factory default).
So I would leave that alone and trust Netgear on that. Once again, I'm not an expert on the question so my explanation may be wrong but that's how I understood the thing, I usually only tweak mount options for filesystems.

Speaking of tweaks, I think Netgear did some filesystem tweaking (which I believe is a block size change) with 6.1.5 and that those tweaks required a factory default to be applied, did you do one after that update ?
http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detai ... /related/1

If you didn't explicitly select encryption, then it is not encrypted. You have, I think, to delete the volume and recreate one with encryption enabled to get it. Of course encrypting has a negative impact on performance that is noticeable on the ARM models.

Disabling snapshots consists in disabling continuous protection on each share, I think that's what you've done.

For the space available you have to take some other things into consideration :
1- the OS partition and swap take some space (I think this should be around 10GB)
2- there are two ways to count the space, MB or MiB => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
3- then there is the filesystem that loses some space too I think.

I actually have 10.89Tb available for data storage (not sure if this is what you meant by free).

HTTP/HTTPS are required for admin access, I don't think you can actually turn them off. They are there to get you some other options I think and the "toggle" is here to stay coherent with the interface but I don't think the OS will let you turn those off.

I'd also like to make sure that you know how important a backup is and that the raid is not in anyway a backup. So you shouldn't trust your data to one device. (I think you knew that but it doesn't hurt to make sure, and your phrasing concerning your data let imagine either that this was to get us a better picture, or that you didn't want to tweak yet because you haven't any backup and are afraid of losing those).

Thanks for the detailed explanations!

1. yes, on 6.1.8, I did update and then subsequently did a factory reset. mdgm was the one who first suggested that a few days back.
2. I agree that encryption would have negative impact on performance so I will leave that alone as unencrypted.
3. yes, i went through each of the folders under "data" and disabled continuous protection. It is slightly different from the NV+V2 where you can create different shares. here on the RN104, it seems we create share folders under the "data" volume.
4. As for backup, having gone through the biggest scare of my life few days before, I have accepted that I need a backup of my NAS. This is why I bought the RN104 to act as a backup of my older NV+V2.
5. with the readynas NV+V2, i am losing around 2GB on 822GB. On a RN104, losing 34GB seems a bit much considering that the file contents are identical. Just hope that I can find the real root cause of this difference.

dyv.

Update - I just saw this link -

http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=72934&p=406274#p406274

so... i decided to try using the file manager on a windows 8 system to see what happens....

RN104: (Note: I have since added 4GB of data to this and explains the 826GB vs 822GB)
On Windows 8: size=887,116,422,736 (826GB) Size on Disk=887,146,497,024 (826GB)
On Windows 8.1:size = 887,116,422,736 (826GB) size on Disk=923,024,752,640 (859GB). 33GB difference.... wow.

this tells me the 8.1 system is not reporting the size on disk properly.. maybe?.... let's try the same experiment on the NV+v2 to see if we see similar discrepancies.

NV+V2:
On Windows 8: size=882,942,683,876 (822GB) size on Disk =882,972,759,040 (822GB)
On windows 8.1:size=882,942,683,876 (822GB) size on Disk =886,180,858,368 (824GB) hmm... only 2 GB difference here.

Is the RN104 (6.1.8 ) reporting the "size on disk" to Win 8.1 differently as compared to how the NV+v2 (5.3.10) reports it to Win 8.1?

Based on the link above, looks like this may explain the different behavior.