I’m very close to buying an EX4, just a little concerned over the poor performance figures / remarks of the various reviews available on-line…
While I don’t doubt the potential performance of this box, particularly by bonding the 2 NICs and running 4 x WD Red in RAID 10 configuration, I just wonder what the ‘real-world’ experience has been for those who actually own one of these?
If I proceed with a purchase, I would be expecting it to perform well when streaming HD videos (circa 10Gb in size) via my Asus Darknight router. Surely, the promisingly specificied EX4 can do this, without needing to opt for a 2-bay “Synology 214 Play” instead…?
Not sure what you’re asking here. Just what “poor performace figures/ remarks” are you referring too?
It would be more helpful if you ask specific question. It’ll be easier to give you specific answers.
As far as streaming videos, I have no issues streaming 20GB + videos to multiple devices at the same time. Of couse this is going to depend on your network and you individual media playing devices as to what you will be able to do.
What RAID configuration are you running with and have you tried bonding the NICs to increase bandwidth? Have you any Read/Write performance figures to share? I am reassured to hear that media streaming performance is good, despite the general lower performance noted by the above reviews.
Questions specifically to WD. Are these lower figures acknowledged at all by WD? Was this device really not designed to win any performance race, as the TECHGAGE website suggests?
Well, first the Techgage and PCWorld reviews I find a little disingenuous, at least in their comparisons.
The Techgage article compair the EX4 (in RAID 5) to a dual-bay Synology DS213+ (in RAID 0 & RAID 1), which is not a fair comparison. As well, it seems that they seemed to have used different criteria on each one.
The PCWorld article compairs the EX4 to a QNAP, but I didn’t see anything in the article about what RAID mode they tested in. Again, one would assume that they tested both the EX4 and QNAP in the same RAID mode, but it doesn’t say they did. Not only that, but there does seem to be some other errors in their article.
The PC Perspective article I just find way off. Especially when you consider that the Techgage article had much high read/writes wiith iSCSI then their 40MB/s read/writes.
As far as real world though, I have mine set as RAID 5 and the read/writes are pretty close to what Techgage’s article states, however my reads are much closer to 70MB/s (with a 10GB file).
Now, is this blazing speed, NO, but it’s not what I would call “poor performace” either. Performace wise, it’s probably somewhere in the middle to upper middle range, slower in the read/write performace than some others, but not so slow that you’d want to pull your hair out.
