Netgear Ready NAS 3130
The ReadyNAS 3130 is a 1U rack-mount enterprise-class storage device. It's sold in a diskless configuration with space for up to four hard disks. The documentation suggests an official maximum capacity of 24TB, by using 6TB disks, although there's no reason it shouldn't work with 8TB disks (such as Seagate's Archive V2 ST8000AS0002) for a total of 32TB.
It's powered by an Intel Atom C2338 processor running at 1.7GHz, with 2GB of ECC memory, expandable to 16GB. The specification suggests a maximum of 75 users, which is what could be called a small-to-medium sized organisation, although the feature set is ideal for home users who are particularly enthusiastic about a solid storage setup as well.
Performance
The ReadyNAS 3130 was tested with four WD Red 6TB hard disks, set up in an X-RAID 2 configuration. I measured the unit's performance with a standard SMB share using Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit under Windows 7, and a Robocopy file transfer both to and from the unit of a 5GB folder of JPG files and a 5GB folder of larger movie files.
I'm only measuring the speeds of a single client transfer here. With an 802.3ad bonded link, you can run multiple client transfers and expect to see these speeds from all of them, as well as redundancy and backup.
Here are the results achieved by the Netgear ReadyNAS 3130:
Robocopy (MB/sec)
- 5GB Small Files Read: 52.4
- 5GB Small Files Write: 47.5
- 5GB Large Files Read: 94.5
- 5GB Large Files Write: 108.1
Intel NAS PT (MB/sec)
- HD Video: 100.6
- 2xHD: 113.3
- 4xHD: 113.9
- HD Record: 120.7
- HD Playback: 105.5
- Content Creation: 12.5
- Office Productivity: 67.4
- File Copy To NAS: 122
- File Copy From NAS: 89
- Directory Copy From NAS: 11.3
- Directory Copy To NAS: 18.2
- Photo Album: 13.3
These results are as expected, driven as much by the CPU performance as the network speed. The Atom processor means the HD Record and File Copy To NAS elements max out the speed of gigabit Ethernet, while the intense Photo Album and Directory Copy To NAS test shows a marked improvement over consumer-grade NAS units like the Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay, as do the Robocopy tests.
Power consumption with the disk heads parked and system idle hit 35.9W, while with the drives in use, the ReadyNAS 3130 consumes 46.5W. That's still more efficient than running a PC-based storage server.