Netgear ReadyNAS: NAS done right

One of the most popular pages on this blog is about a storage device that has a lot of enemies and few defenders, the SC101. It’s Windows-only, uses a proprietary filesystem and when (not if) it starts crashing, just say bye-bye to your data. The product didn’t do much good for Netgear’s reputation. So when Netgear offered me the opportunity to test a real NAS solution, I agreed. So they sent me the ReadyNAS NV+.

The ReadyNAS is a 4-bay network-attached storage device with a nice set of features. Yes, it does storage, but it also has an FTP server, an iTunes streaming server and uPnP (Universal Plug-and-Play: works with Microsoft products like Windows XP and Xbox). I’ve been able to use one for over a month and in short: I’m probably going to buy one.

PRO:

• it’s big: 4 bays gives you a max size of 4TB. That should do for a while.
• it’s silent. It ran in my living room, and the noise was hardly noticeable.
• it’s fast (when connected to a 100Mbps client, I reached speeds between 7.3 MB/s and 8 MB/s – the theoretical max for 100Mbps is 12.5 MB/s)
• it’s robust: I experienced no downtime, but then again, 1 month is only a month.
• it’s full-featured: the streaming protocols and in the latest firmware, the BitTorrent client, make it very flexible.
• it’s scalable: the X-RAID technology lets you pop in new disks and scale automatically (without reformatting)

CON:

• price: it’s not the cheapest NAS on the market (e.g. LaCie has a comparbale device, but it does not support all the streaming/torrent protocols that ReadyNAS has)
• proprietary: I’m not sure how easy it is to recover data from an X-RAID formatted disk set. I don’t think you can mount them in a Linux system and recover the data.

I also received the latest Storage Central (successor of the SC101) to test, but I never opened the box. The trauma of the previous one was still too big.

In any case, it seems Netgear finally made a good choice by buying Infrant, with the ReadyNAS product line.

Related posts:

1. Netgear SC101: crappy storage UPDATE: also read my post about testing the Netgear ReadyNAS...
2. Best way to store one terabyte? I’ve gotten quite some response on my Netgear SC101...
3. WD My Book is not really ‘Pro’ storage After having Lacie, Maxtor, Iomega and most recently Netgear StorageCentral...
4. LG KU-800: have low expectations Because the posts on disappointing hardware are very popular...