Netgear ReadyNAS 202

[crmaris]

Today, we get to look at and test a NAS from Netgear for the very first time. The ReadyNAS 202 is powered by a Cortex A15 CPU and has two Gigabit Ethernet ports for faster network speeds. Its key feature is that it uses the BTRFS file system instead of the far more common EXT4 file system.

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[thevoiceofreason]

The NAS is powered by a Texas Instruments ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core

Actually, the manufacturer of the SoC is Annapurna Labs, as your own picture on page 5 shows. The company is interesting, as it was an Israeli startup in stealth mode that was acquired by Amazon in January this year for some $370M. This is one of very few products currently on the market featuring their SoC.

Little is known about the SoC due to the secretive nature of the manufacturer. This has some ramifications for hobbyists, as it's currently unsupported in mainline Linux, as opposed to the previous iteration of ReadyNAS (102) which utilizes the well-supported Marvell Armada 370 which as of Linux 4.0 is supported out-of-the-box.

 

[crmaris]

The official specs state "ARM Cortex A15 1.4 GHz " and this CPU is made by TI according to their site. Interesting info however you shared there, thanks!

 

[thevoiceofreason]

ARM Cortex A15 is just a name for a CPU core blueprint licensed by ARM Holdings to a number of companies. Nvidia Tegra 4 is based on A15, as is Samsung Exynos 5, as is TI OMAP 5, as is Annapurna Alpine featured here, and so on.

What differentiates these products is what's "between the cores" so to speak, for example Marvell might include a cryptographic engine (CESA) for networking applications while TI might enable NEON for multimedia processing. Then there is connectivity, like presence of SATA controllers, PCIe lanes or ethernet PHYs etc. that all live on the SoC.

Annapurna SoCs based on A15 are said to include "multiple innovations to provide a seamless networking and storage fabric for enterprise and datacenter equipment" but what these are specifically, nobody knows. It was interesting enough for Amazon though.