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Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Review
By dbott | September 21, 2008
Earlier this year, I was selected to participate in the beta testing of a new Network Attached Storage (NAS) device made by Netgear. I was in the midst of writing a review of the product but one of the other beta testers, Jan Olbrecht, beat me to the punch and posted a very detailed and thorough review here. Additionally, Fr. Robert Ballacer of The Tech Stop also provided a full review and video here.
While I would love to sit back and echo all of Jan’s and Fr. Robert’s findings, or list all of the features off of the official spec sheet, it would be rather pointless, so instead I would like to talk about some of the other things that impress me about the ReadyNAS Pro and ReadyNAS product line in general:
A Development Team That Listens to the Community
Originally, the ReadyNAS Pro was designed to be a business-only product, but there was such interest from the community that Netgear is now planning on releasing the ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer Edition, which is the same hardware with a slightly different firmware that contains a subset of the Business Edition. The main differences between the 2 devices are:
- Business Edition ships with Enterprise-class hard drives where as the Pioneer only comes “bare bones” (no drives included). The drives included on the Business Edition are also “Enterprise-class” drives, meaning that they were designed with higher vibrational tolerances to perform in NAS devices and servers that are running in a 24/7 environment.
- Business Edition has support for these additional features:
- iSCSI (included on the Business Edition; optional upgrade on the Pioneer)
- SNMP
- Volume Snapshots
- Network UPS
- Network Teaming/Failover and VLAN
- DHCP Server
- Flex-RAID
- A full list of features for both the Business and Pioneer models can be found here
This same development team can be found monitoring the ReadyNAS.com forums on a daily basis, providing help to the community, updating the firmware to fix bugs and add new features and enhancements, as well as just listening to the needs of their customers.
SDK Development Kit for Add-ons
Although I mentioned above that the Pioneer may lack a few more advanced features, the fact that Netgear provides SSH access and an SDK means that the community can develop whatever features and applications they would like to run on their ReadyNAS device.
Some of the add-ons that have already been developed and are available are:
- Bittorrent clients
- ReadyNAS Photo sharing
- Network Utilities, such as NTOP
- WordPress Add-on
- phpBB Add-on
Performance
Okay, I said I wasn’t going to echo the other reviews, but the ReadyNAs Pro screams! During testing, some of the team were able to achieve read and write speeds above 100 MB/s (that’s right, 100 megaBYTES per second). Below are some screenshots taken by one of the beta testers, Alex Liebau, as he saturates a gigabit LAN:
Can you imagine dragging and dropping a 2 GB in 20 seconds?
For more information about features and performance, check out the Definitive Guide to the ReadyNAS Pro.
Warranty and Support
Netgear offers an industry-leading 5 year warranty .
If you are in the market for a full-featured, high performance NAS look no further than the ReadyNAS Pro. And if you really want a video review, here’s mine:
Topics: ReadyNAS, Tech | 1 Comment »
September 26th, 2008 at 5:30 am
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