Netgear ReadyNAS 312 2-bay SMB / SOHO NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 11, 2013 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- IT Computing
- NetGear
- ReadyNAS
Miscellaneous Aspects and Final Words
The Netgear ReadyNAS 312 is a 2-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-1 configuration. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in X-RAID2 (RAID-1). The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| Netgear ReadyNAS 312 RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Idle | 11.53 W | |
| 4TB Single Disk Initialization | 20.61 W | |
| 4TB RAID-0 to 4TB RAID-1 (Expand from 1 to 2 Disks) | 10h 43m 40s | 34.24 W |
| 4TB RAID-1 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 2 Disks) | 11h 10m 45s | 33.85 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, the ReadyNAS 312 has plenty of positives: a clean and refreshing UI that is not too over-whelming, an exciting choice of file system with btrfs, a snapshot feature with minimal performance impact and good performance in a small physical footprint (compared to other 2-bay NAS units). Some features such as cloud access / mobile apps for data access are indispensable in this product space and Netgear ticks the appropriate boxes in this offering. Unfortunately, there are a few negatives too: Initial setup could be more user-friendly (particularly for the 2-bay where there is no display on the unit), the app ecosystem needs a lot of work compared to the competition and the UI / OS could do with some extra stability when attempting to install apps on the unit. Admittedly, the negatives are not show stopper issues / particularly relevant once the unit is configured and up and running. In the bigger scheme of things, we also hope that Netgear will continue to support this product long-term and not put it to pasture within a couple of years like what was done with the NV+ v2.
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mcfrede - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Final paragraph states the product name as the "ReadyNSA" am I the only one to find that interpretation hilarious? (sorry for being slightly off topic).ganeshts - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Thanks for noticing that. I fixed the typo now :)jramskov - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Using btrf is certainly an interesting choice. It would be nice to see an article that explains the advantages of using it instead of ext4.WilliamG - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Ganesh, Thanks for the review - just wondering if you know if this unit supports Hyper-V virtual machines via SMB ? I have been trying to find out from Netgear for a couple of days but no one can answer me. Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V allows the use of SMB 3 file shares to host virtual machine files. Can this unit work for me? thanks in advancewarezme - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
To be honest I haven't ever really considered a NAS for storage but if I were, a two bay NAS seems a bit useless to me. So you can do RAID 1 and lose half of your storage or do RAID 0 and gain your space but lose any hopes of recovery if one of your drives dies. Wouldn't a 3 bay NAS be the minimum common sense size?bsd228 - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
You don't lose half your storage with Raid1. Unreliable storage has limited value. You keep all of your data if one drive fails, which is a lot better than what happens with a failure on any of those 1 disk NAS units out there. If you want capacity or higher performance, then you get a 4+ disk unit, or roll your own.brian.goodman - Saturday, December 7, 2013 - link
When I had a drive failure on the first drive of the RAID pair in my old ReadyNAS Duo, I learned that the second RAID drive was not accessible, since the ReadyNAS Duo boots from an operating system installed on the first drive. ReadyNAS RAIDar could not even see the NAS, so it was not possible to diagnose the problem through the software interface. Instead I had to decode the blinking lights on the ReadyNAS to deduce that the first drive had failed.Is this still the case in the current generation of ReadyNAS products? In fact is that the case with other NAS products?
Losing the ability to use RAIDar and Frontview was a big surprise and I would have expected that to be flagged in product reviews. What happens after drive failure is not something I have seen reported in any NAS review, but it is very important, as most users expect to be able to access the second RAID drive in case of failure.
Could you add failure mode analysis to your reviews, covering whether the NAS is accessible through software for diagnostic purposes (as against physical inspection of a box), and whether the remaining drives of a multi-drive NAS are actually useable one a failure mode occurs?
Thanks,
Brian