Seagate's Intel Rangeley NAS Pro 4-bay Review
by Ganesh T S on August 27, 2014 7:00 AM ESTSingle Client Performance - CIFS and NFS on Linux
A CentOS 6.2 virtual machine was used to evaluate NFS and CIFS performance of the NAS when accessed from a Linux client. We chose IOZone as the benchmark for this case. In order to standardize the testing across multiple NAS units, we mount the CIFS and NFS shares during startup with the following /etc/fstab entries.
//<NAS_IP>/PATH_TO_SMB_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER cifs rw,username=guest,password= 0 0
<NAS_IP>:/PATH_TO_NFS_SHARE /PATH_TO_LOCAL_MOUNT_FOLDER nfs rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2, sec=sys,mountaddr <NAS_IP>,mountvers=3,mountproto=udp,local_lock=none,addr=<NAS_IP> 0 0
The following IOZone command was used to benchmark the CIFS share:
IOZone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT -f /PATH_TO_LOCAL_CIFS_MOUNT/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_CIFS_CSV.csv
IOZone provides benchmark numbers for a multitude of access scenarios with varying file sizes and record lengths. Some of these are very susceptible to caching effects on the client side. This is evident in some of the graphs in the gallery below.
Readers interested in the hard numbers can refer to the CSV program output here.
The NFS share was also benchmarked in a similar manner with the following command:
IOZone -aczR -g 2097152 -U /nfs_test_mount/ -f /nfs_test_mount/testfile -b <NAS_NAME>_NFS_EXCEL_BIN.xls > <NAS_NAME>_NFS_CSV.csv
The IOZone CSV output can be found here for those interested in the exact numbers.
A summary of the bandwidth numbers for various tests averaged across all file and record sizes is provided in the table below. As noted previously, some of these numbers are skewed by caching effects. A reference to the actual CSV outputs linked above make the entries affected by this effect obvious.
| Seagate NAS Pro 4-bay - Linux Client Performance (MBps) | ||
| IOZone Test | CIFS | NFS |
| Init Write | 66 | 64 |
| Re-Write | 67 | 70 |
| Read | 31 | 117 |
| Re-Read | 31 | 121 |
| Random Read | 19 | 55 |
| Random Write | 62 | 70 |
| Backward Read | 18 | 43 |
| Record Re-Write | 771* | 1173* |
| Stride Read | 28 | 101 |
| File Write | 64 | 74 |
| File Re-Write | 67 | 76 |
| File Read | 22 | 89 |
| File Re-Read | 22 | 90 |
| *: Benchmark number skewed due to caching effect | ||
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cletus_slackjawd - Sunday, November 2, 2014 - link
I really like this idea. I have an old Buffalo TerraStation 4x500gb that I have outgrown. Instead of replacing with another 4bay NAS I'll look for a single or dual and just buy a second as the backup. I never made consistant backups of my current NAS and as you stated, one hardware failure away from losing my data without expensive and time consuming fix.Jeff.Adams - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
I just inquired about buying a 4 or 6 bay Seagate NAS Pro and the vendor told me that Seagate only certifies their own drives to run in these NAS appliances. Your review was with WD drives so obviously the NAS works just fine with other brands. And obviously Seagate isn't going to sell it's own NAS with someone else's drives in it. Would Seagate not warranty the NAS if I put HGST drives in it? And if I *must* buy Seagate drives to get full warranty coverage, do you like the models that they come with?Thank you :)