Netgear ReadyNAS RN524X 4-Bay NAS Performance
The Netgear ReadyNAS RN524X comes equipped with an Intel Pentium D1508 dual core, four thread, 2.2GHz which should do very well in our benchmarks.
For hard drives, we will use three 4TB WD Red NAS drives. These are fairly standard hard drives used by many people for NAS storage boxes.
The performance benchmarks we will use are Intel NAS Performance Toolkit. We have switched our network over to 10GbE capability and now use a D-Link DXS-1210-12TC switch. This is a great entry level 10GbE switch that is appropriate for SMB usage where the Netgear ReadyNAS RN524X is targeted. Netgear also makes a line of SMB 10Gbase-T switches that we reviewed such as the Netgear ProSafe XS716E Review: A Sweet 16 port 10Gbase-T Switch.
To get a performance baseline, we will start off with 1 GbE network configuration, then advance to 10GbE. Whenever we changed RAID types, we waited until the NAS has completed parity consistency check (volume resync.)
Intel NAS Performance Toolkit
The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (Intel NASPT) is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable performance comparisons between network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
The Netgear RN524X can saturate the 1GbE LAN connection without issues and performs as expected.
Let us move to 1GbE Encrypted tests. The Netgear RN524X only allows for the entire volume to be encrypted.
1GbE encrypted benchmarks hold up very well and are one of the top performers in this area; RAID 6 encrypted results do fall off a bit though.
Let us move on to 10GbE testing.
Now we see 10GbE Encrypted results.
The Intel Pentium D1508 processor holds up very well in our encryption tests against the AMD R-Series RX-421BD Quad Core 2.1GHz processor in the other NAS. The key takeaway is that this unit simply obliterates 1GbE NAS units that are throttled by their network interfaces.
Next, we will sum up the ReadyNAS features and show our final thoughts on this unit.
