NAS comparison: iomega and netgear
As you will know, I’ve had no end of problems with iomega NAS boxes (and customer support for that matter), and so with a recent purchase decided to test the market again and purchase a different product.
Back in the day we had some Netgear ReadyNas boxes, little desktop units offering 2-3TB of network storage which was ideal for backups. The ReadyNas boxes weren’t special in any way, the interface was decidedly average and the software had a few quirks, but they did have one brilliant feature – they hardly ever stopped working.
So, I decided to give them a go again and have since done a direct comparison between the previously-complained-about iomega units and the newly-purchased netgear ones. There are a couple of differences you should know before you worry about the performance though: 1) the netgears are considerably more expensive; 2) the netgears come with a much better warranty.
How much more expensive? Well, I paid about £900 for an iomega ix4-200r and about £4,000 for the equivalent-size netgear. For the larger units, a fully populated ix12-300r would set you back about £4,000 whereas the equivalent netgear cost more like £9,000. The netgear 3100s come out of the box with two power supplies and two NICs, whereas the iomega only has one of each, so all together it sounds like it’s much more aimed at enterprise level customers. In addition, the netgear 3100 allows for creation of LUNs over 2TBs which was my initial complaint about the small iomega boxes.
These tests were all performed using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator from within a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, accessing a 512GB LUN created on the devices.
So, onto the results. Using the classic iometer config file I tested for 100% read, 100% write and the Real Life 60% Random, 65% Read setups (you can download the iometer config file here), the numbers are MBps:
So, the Netgear 3100 vs the ix4-200r:
Next, the Netgear 3200 vs the ix12-300r:
I know. I’m as shocked as you are – with the smaller NAS box comparison, as you’d expect, the more expensive and reliable netgear wipes the floor with the iomega device, but when you scale up to the larger models the iomega devices start responding better again. Very strange! To make matters worse, the netgear 3200 units only have two network ports in them whereas when you upscale to the larger iomega boxes they come with four.
To illustrate the point here I’ve run the same comparison with the iomegas using 1, 2 and 4 bonded uplinks:
As you can see, tragically allowing more NICs to share the load means you can get increasingly better throughput (the iops rise in a similar fashion) whereas with the 3200 this will only be possibly with a maximum of two (yes, this is a touch unfair because I haven’t done the same test using both of the available NICs on the netgear and I should have) – but you know what? I’m still going to buy the netgear units over the iomega units just because of the horrible time I’ve had up until now.
So, in summary:
- The 3100 is significantly better than the ix4-200r but there’s a cost implication – for on-site backups I think the 3100 will certainly become the standard choice
- The 3200 performs well, but not as well as the ix12-300r
- I will never buy another ix12-300r due to the history of issues I’ve had