Western Digital My Cloud EX4 and LenovoEMC ix4-300d Home NAS Units Review
by Ganesh T S on February 26, 2014 2:30 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Western Digital
- LenovoEMC
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words
The LenovoEMC ix4-300d and WD EX4 are both 4-bay NAS units, and there are multiple applicable disk configurations (JBOD / RAID-0 / RAID-1 / RAID-5 / RAID-6 / RAID-10). Most users looking for a balance between performance and redundancy are going to choose RAID-5. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild duration testing as well as power consumption recording with the unit configured in RAID-5 mode. The disks used for benchmarking (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.
| RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||||
| Activity | LenovoEMC ix4-300d | Western Digital EX4 | ||
| Duration | Avg. Power | Duration | Avg. Power | |
| Idle (4D) | NA | 17.21 W | NA | 19.83 W |
| Single Disk Init (4TB in JBOD) | Immediate | 21.79 W | 14m | 24.36 W |
| 4 TB JBOD (1D) to 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) | 15h 44m | 32.31 W | 10h 45m | 32.65 W |
| 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) to 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) | 2d 9h 23m | 43.23 W | 1d 13h 42m | 42.62 W |
| 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) to 12 TB RAID-5 (4D) | 1d 7h 48m | 56.11 W | 28m* | 51.19 W* |
| 12 TB RAID-5 Rebuild (4D) | 1d 5h 34m | 53.06 W | 21h 33m | 52.83 W |
Note that the 3-disk RAID-5 to 4-disk RAID-5 expansion step is not applicable for the EX4. Instead, we have data from a fresh 4-disk RAID-5 initialization run in those cells.
Coming to the business end of the review, we find it hard to recommend either the ix4-300d or the EX4. While the ix4-300d turns out to be a better hardware platform (other than the absence of hot-swap capability), the WD EX4 turns out to be the one with a better set of features in the firmware. The performance of the ix4-300d is miles ahead of the WD EX4 for the same configuration, using the same disks. On top of that, the ix4-300d is cheaper too ($270 for the ix4-300d compared to $360 for the WD EX4 in a diskless configuration). However, LenovoEMC has stripped the ix4-300d of some essential features that many consumers take for granted in the NAS space.
Western Digital needs to go back to the drawing board from a hardware perspective. The hardware configuration heavily pulls down the performance. Putting in two USB 3.0 ports (when the SoC is apparently not configured to even take full advantage of the 4x SATA to PCIe x4 bridge) seems to be something done to tick a marketing checkbox item. Considering that WD is new to the 4-bay home-consumer NAS market, this can be excused. Hopefully, when the time comes for a refresh, more attention is paid to such aspects and we get a platform that can do justice to the firmware base that Western Digital has developed.
On the other hand, there is little to complain about the ix4-300d performance-wise. However, LenovoEMC needs to heavily reconsider the way they differentiate between their ix- and px- series units. Other vendors such as QNAP and Synology differentiate their ARM / x86 units only on platform performance (CPU and RAM). The firmware features (at least, those meant for the SOHO/home-consumer market) are uniform across both their ARM and x86 units. LenovoEMC risks losing market share to such vendors if they continue with their current differentiation plan.
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Navvie - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
I am amazed that a torrent client is included in the Lenovo machine. I wonder how many customers will put that to honest, law abiding use?Although RAID6 has a big impact on capacity when dealing with four drives, I'd really like to see those numbers. I would be disappointed not to see those numbers at 5+ drives.
Beany2013 - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
I've found the torrent client pretty useful on my Syno DS214+ - if I find I need to download an ISO for a VM appliance or distro from work, I can dial into my NAS at home, and tell it to kick off the download while I'm out at work.Yes, you can use it for nefarious purposes, but that's down to the user - I could use a car to mow down some grannies at a bus stop or ram-raid a convenience store, but that doesn't mean we should ban cars.
(my word, that as an atrocious analogy. I shall flagellate myself later as punishment)
Also, nice to see that The Registers quick review a few weeks ago wasn't wrong about the performance of that WD unit, it's bloody pathetic.
ddriver - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
Torrents are not intrinsically illegal.Death666Angel - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
Why would you use RAID6 with 4 disks? Why not just RAID 10? RAID 6 only makes sense to me once you go to 5 and more.DanNeely - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
Possibilities:A) It's provided as a feature check.
B) Leaving it in reduces the number of changes vs a baseline firmware that is also used for larger models.
C) If the enclosure supports a way to add external drives to an array. (doubtful)
I'm guessing a combination of A and B.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
1 and 2 only answer the question of "why should they have it" not "why would you use it". :)PEJUman - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link
R6 can tolerate 2 any disks failure.R10 can tolerate 1 disk failure, maybe 2 (if both disks from the same stripe failed, you're hosed). I tend to think R10 as a higher performing R1, not a dual disk failure redundancy.
Nonetheless, I agree that the R6 usability on a 4 disks array is quite dubious.
Navvie - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
RAID6 would allow any two drives to fail without a loss of data. RAID10 also allows two drive failures, but only if those two drives don't mirror each other. Drives are more likely to fail while reconstructing a failed drive. In a RAID10 setup the failed drive is being rebuilt from data on just one drive, if that drive also fails? Bye bye data.RAID1, RAID10 offers no better reliability than RAID1.
RAID6 has something like 8-10x the reliability of RAID1, and 100x of RAID5.
Adding RAID6 numbers to reviews as this would allow devices with 4 bays and up to be tested consistently - assuming the firmware supported RAID6.
powerwiz - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Generally any NAS comes with a bit-torrent client. Lacies do I know for certain as I have a Lacie NAS. Works well to.Torrents if you do not know were created by University researchers to distribute large amounts of data fast. What you use it for is up to you. Take the internet..the biggest money maker is still porn. You can get a college degree via the internet but it seems worldwide its main use is porn. All up to the user.
vanel86 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link
The torrent client within lifelines tends to corrupts downloads if the torrent relies on DHT(if it relies on DHT only it won't even start). When i download files out of it (linuxes iso what the hell are you thinking :P) i need to run those files out of utorrent to check if they are fine or not(most cases require a 1% redownload each time)