Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus Network Storage Server Review

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus More Benchmarks

The next test I ran on the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus was the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit Exerciser. The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network attached storage (NAS) devices. Intel NASPT focuses on user level performance using real world workload traces gathered from typical digital home applications: HD video playback and record, data backup and restore utilities, office productivity applications, video rendering/content creation and more. Intel NASPT reproduces the file system traffic observed in these traces onto whatever storage solution the user provides, records the system response, and reports a rich variety of performance information. The end result is readily comparable performance measurements that are useful to developers as well as intuitive and compelling to consumers.

Speeds for this test ranged from 65.3 MB/s to 1.1 MB/s depending on which work flow was being run. The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit really does stress a device. The Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus was less than 5 feet from my desk, and I could clearly hear the drives spinning up and down depending on the test. The only time I heard the fan running was during this test.

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

What is odd to note here is the at the 64KB test, the Write Speeds drop considerable. I original felt that this was just an aberation in the test, but after re-running the test five times, I hid the about the same speeds with the same drop noted. What I believe is happening here is some type of buffering issue, but why it occurs at 64KB is unknown. The test achieved 23MB/s Write Speed and 104.2MB/s Read Speeds. 104.2MB/s is an incredibly high value for an ATTO Test on a NAS Device!

The test achieved 13.3MB/s Write Speed and 54.7MB/s Read Speeds.

The last benchmark that was run on the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus was CrystalDiskMark, which tests Sequential and Random read and write speeds over a variety of file sizes.

With CrystalMark v3.01 we ran test with a file size of 50MB and 100MB. We observed little difference between the 50MB and 100MB tests, with the 50MB tests coming slightly ahead with Read speeds topping out at 54.68MB/s and Write Speeds topping out at 14.72MB/s

Let’s wrap this up, and see what Legit Reviews really thinks about this NAS!