Manufacturer: Netgear Price: $ 300 US Author: Steven Walton Date: 06/02/2015

[ Introduction ]

Today we have the new Annapurna Alpine Cortex A15 powered Netgear Ready NAS RN202 on hand for some benchmarking. This new series features a 2-bay and 4-bay model, though for today’s review we have the smaller 2-bay version. They come in a number of configurations using either 2TB or 3TB hard drives, while they are also available in diskless form... Back in May of 2014 we took our first look at the Netgear ReadyNAS RN102 and RN104. Back then the $250 4-bay RN104 was particularly interesting as it was the cheapest diskless NAS of its size that we had come across. While the features, build quality and design were all excellent, there was one problem and depending on your priority it was likely a rather big one. Performance was the key issue of these NAS devices and at first we put that down to the use of a low-end Marvell SoC, the Armada 370. However after looking at other previously tested Armada 370 driven NAS devices, such as the Synology DS214, it became clear this wasn’t the only issue. Instead it seemed as though the problems were being caused by Netgear’s choice of filesystem, BTRFS. BTRFS is a relatively new file system, a feature-rich filesystem that prioritizes data integrity over performance. That’s great for enterprise solutions, but for low-cost, low-performance NAS devices that don’t require enterprise level reliability, this is a problem. Synology uses EXT4, the latest of the EXT-based filesystems and the default choice for many Linux distributions. BTRFS is seen as being the next step, but it is not a successor to the default EXT4 file system used in most Linux distributions. That said, it can be expected to replace EXT4 in the future. Theodore Ts’o, a maintainer for EXT3 and EXT4 has stated that he sees BTRFS as a better way forward than continuing to rely on the EXT* technology. A key advantage to BTRFS is that it can support up to sixteen times the data of EXT4, and that’s a lot. However keep in mind EXT4 can address over a million terabytes in a single partition. So then home users don’t really need to be concerned with the storage limitation of the EXT4 filesystem, various enterprises on the other hand do. Unfortunately for the low-end RN100 series the added reliability didn’t outweigh the performance trade off and ultimately we didn’t really like the product. However just one month after reviewing the RN100 series we got our first look at the higher-end Atom powered RN300 series. Performance was better, though we still noticed considerable slow down when measuring write performance when compared to similar spec NAS devices using EXT4 rather than BTRFS. Netgear are sticking with BTRFS for the RN200 series, which is great news for those seriously concerned with data protection, and well, this is ultimately the point of having a NAS, to store and protect your data.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Features & Design Internal Hardware Software Test System & Power Consumption Benchmarks: File Download Performance Benchmarks: File Upload Performance Benchmarks: File Copy Performance Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark Conclusion Next Page ->

Fanboy

Posted on: 06/09/2015 11:06 AM BTRFS is the future.

Pascal

Posted on: 06/09/2015 09:17 PM Much better processor choice this time.

Unlocked

Posted on: 06/13/2015 08:45 PM So where is the 6 and 8 bay models Netgear?

Pliskin

Posted on: 06/26/2015 01:26 PM I am looking a the 4-bay model of this, the price seems very good.