Reviewed by Robert Ballecer, SJ — March 14, 2007
Too Much Storage.
Even with today’s Terabyte hard drives, high-capacity Flash disks, hot swappable eSATA enclosures, online storage services and the like, those three words almost bring ridicule upon themselves. My documents are precious, my pictures irreplaceable. My personal information cannot be duplicated should it be lost and my music collection continues to grow every day. No matter how much storage I have, I always seem to need more.
Upon closer inspection however, it might not be a case of not having enough storage, as much as it is not having the RIGHT type of storage. My most precious documents are duplicated on several types of media to guarantee their survival and as my collection of music and videos grows larger, I find myself copying large chunks of my digital entertainment to protect my investment.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a device that offers a massive amount of storage, easy expandability, speedy transfers, customizable security, guaranteed uptime and data redundancy all in a form factor that doesn’t require its own room or a second mortgage?
Infrant wants to give you those capabilities with their ReadyNAS NV+
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
ReadyNAS NV+ Highlights:
- Infrant NSP IT3107 Processor
- Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo frame support
- 4 lockable & hot-swappable SATA disk trays
- RAID 0/1/5 with Infrant X-RAID
- Three USB expansion ports (1 Front / 2 Back) with support for USB Flash Drives, Hard Drives, Printers and USB Hubs.
- Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix Compatibility
- LCD panel for Standalone Status
- 92mm cooling fan for cooling with reduced noise
- Noise-Killer Power Supply for quiet operation
- Low power consumption
- User-Programmable backup button
- Compact size (8″H x 5″W x 9″D)
- Compatibility with network DVD players and UPnP AV streaming devices
- Multi-lingual, browser-based setup & RAIDar Client Software
- Security Port for Kensington locks
- EMC® Retrospect® backup software for Windows (5-client license) included
- EMC® Retrospect® backup software for Macintosh (5-client license) included
First Impressions
The first thing that strikes you about the ReadyNAS NV+ is its size. It contains 4 hot-swap hard drives and all the electronics needed to make it a high-performance NAS, yet the entire unit is smaller than the retail packaging for a single hard drive. Turning on the unit yields another surprise as the NV+ is quiet. – Whisper quiet.- There is some fan noise, but it’s a low-pitch hum that is barely audible.
The lights on the front panel provide a plethora of information at a glance. Using its LED lights alone, the NV+ can signal everything from a bad drive to new volume creation or normal status. For more specific information, a small LCD screen is located at the bottom of the front face plate, behind a frosted screen which makes it seem to disappear when the backlight is off. The LCD reports the IP address of the device, the current free space on the drives and the condition of the array or the progress of RAID rebuilding.
The hot swap caddies are also well designed, using a push-pull system to remove or replace drives. The review unit came with 4 Seagate 250GB drives, but Infrant provides a list of all compatible SATA drives and there is no reason why the NV+ wouldn’t be able to support the 1TB and above drives that are soon to be released.
USB functionality is also a standout on the NV+. Whereas many USB enabled NAS devices are content to include their ports on the back of the unit, Infrant added a USB connector at the front of the NV+ in addition to the two at the rear. The entire box is finished in a polished silver coating and the unit feels solid and well constructed.
The Gigabit Ethernet port on the ReadyNAS NV+ automatically detects a network crossover, meaning that you can connect the device to your network via a switch, or plug it directly into the Ethernet port of our PC.
In terms of compatibility, the NV+ is a jack-of-all-trades. It supports Windows, Unix, Linux and Macintosh clients and it will also function as an FTP server. Infrant has also included support for a wide range of popular protocols including Samba, AFP, FTP, Rsync, WebDAV, and more.
 |
 |
 |
 |
Installation
Out of the box, the NV+ obtained an IP address from the lab’s DHCP server and displayed that IP on its front LCD panel. Since the NV+ defaults to an “all access” mode, I was immediately able to access the box through Windows Explorer using the SMB protocol. Going one step further, I accessed the box via its IP from a MacBook Pro and a Dell laptop running Fedora without as much as a hiccup.
 |
 |
The included software makes setting up the RAID very easy. The device can be configured in RAID 0, 1 and 5, but it is the X-RAID that sets this unit apart. The X-RAID feature is a dynamically expandable RAID. This means that the user is able to expand the capacity of the box, ON THE FLY simply by adding drives.
USB Expansion Ports
Something I did not expect was the expandability of the NV+ USB option. Several USB expansion solutions that I have tested in the past have had very limited support for devices that are not strictly storage. In most of those tests, it felt as if USB support was an afterthought. This is not the case with the NV+ — It worked with all the hard drive storage devices that connected to the unit. I was able to connect Maxtor, Ximeta and Western Digital external USB hard drives, as well as a home-built, no-name USB enclosure with a Seagate Hard Drive. It even powered and properly ran two of my 2.5” IDE drives in miniature enclosures.
USB flash drives support was no different – The NV+ recognized and installed 32MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB and 4GB USB flash drives from SanDisk, PNY, Crucial, MA Labs, and a variety of generic manufacturers. In each case, the NV+ recognized the flash drives after a few (approximately 30) seconds and the drive was then displayed an available share that was able to transfer files at the full speed of the USB device.
The NV+ can also act as a print server for USB printers. I connected a Samsung ML-1740 laser printer as well as Ink Jet printers from Lexmark, Dell and HP. Although I was not able to get my Multifunction Dell 962 to work properly – most probably the fault of the Dell drivers and NOT the NV+, the NV+ worked flawlessly with all the other standard USB laser and inkjet printers that were tested.
Impressed with the built-in USB connectivity of the NV+, I decided to test its support of USB hubs, something that is noticeably missing from many of Infant’s competitors. I found a generic USB 2.0 hub in the bowels of my lab and connected it to the NV+, expecting it to fail to recognize the hub as so many SOHO/NAS devices have in the past. I was shocked when the hub powered on without an external power adapter and the NV+ immediately recognized all of the USB thumb drives I had connected to the hub. Excitedly, I started plugging in every USB hub that I had in the lab. – 20 hubs from 10 different manufacturers later, and I concluded that the NV+ had superior USB support.
 |
 |
NAS Performance
We didn’t want to just run benchmark software and give you undecipherable test information, so the TTS crew resorted to the tried-and-true method of real-world benchmarking. We transferred files of various sizes to and from several different computers (notebooks and desktops) over a Gigabit switch to the NV+ in RAID 5 mode. We performed each test several times and split the test between a single large file, several large files and several small files in order to get as wide a swath of data as possible.
Large File 1 Minute 47 Seconds (1 x 1,523,848 KB File)
Large Files 2 Minutes 12 Seconds (1.95GB = 10 x 205,123KB Files)
Small Files: 1.24 Seconds (3.69MB = 100 x 38KB Files)
With such a high performance threshold, the NV+ provides not just a superior redundant storage array, but also an array that can be used in real-time data applications. In practice, I was able to simultaneously stream 30 pieces of high-bitrate video media from the NV+ to 12 different devices (XBOX, XBOX 360, 3 Media Extender, 3 Laptops, 3 Desktops) without any detectable stutter from the playback units.
RAID Functionality
The NV+ is fault-tolerant simplicity itself thanks to Infrant’s X-RAIDfeature. I was able to pull a drive from the array and the NV+ automatically reconfigured itself for the reduced capacity. The best part of this process is that I was still able to access my files during the reconfiguration process. (Though transfer performance understandably dropped while the unit was dynamically resizing the array.) When I plugged the drive back into the unit, the NV+ automatically recognized the drive and began synchronizing the data from the array and resizing the storage space once again. The LCD panel reported which drive was resynching and gave me a percentage completed. Resynching my 1TB NV+ took approximately 2 hours, but this was when the array was mostly empty. The manual states that the resynching can take up to 10 hours in a worst case scenario.
In order to test the ability of the NV+ to recover from a real failure, we installed a 250GB Seagate drive that we modified to fail on command. We loaded the unit with approximately 400GB of data and then triggered a failure. The status light for the drive began blinking and the array reconfigured itself automatically to protect the integrity of the data. True to it’s hot-swap promise, I was able to remove the failed drive with a push of a button and a lift of the latch. I replaced the failed drive with a blank one and reinserted the caddy. The NV+ prepped the drive, synchronized the array and resized the storage space — all without user intervention. At no time did I have to power down the unit and I never lost access to the data I had placed on the array.
Taking the test one step further, I reinstalled the modified drive and initiated several data transfers to and from the array. I triggered the failure in mid transfer to see what would happen to the data. My transfer progress briefly paused, before resuming as a slower pace. The NV+ recognized that the drive had failed and once again initiated is X-RAID resizing. Amazingly, none of the data was corrupted and all the transfers completed successfully.
Our final RAID function test was to build the array from empty drives. Building the RAID from scratch took approximately 2 hours. This initial array creation is the ONLY time during our testing of the NV+ when we did not have access to the storage. I tested same-size SATA drives from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital without any discernable difference in the time needed for initial Volume creation.
 |
 |
Backup Performance
With such good performance and solid redundancy, you might think that Infrant skimped on the backup features — you would be wrong. The Infrant interface lets choose any backup source, any backup destination — including storage devices OTHER than the NV+, a backup schedule, and full or incremental backup options.
To use the Backup button, you need to create a backup job with the backup folder selected as a source and the USB device as the destination. When job creation is complete you are then given the option of assigning that job to the backup button. There is also an option to automatically copy the contents of any USB drive to a share on the NV+ upon device insertion.
Security
Within the web interface, the administrator can choose one of three security modes for the NV+. The first is “Share” — In this mode, access is restricted with a simple password that can control red/write privileges as well as disk quotas. In the “User” mode, the NV+ will recognize user and group accounts for those networks that do not use a domain. In the “Domain” setting, the NV+ can inherit its security settings from an AD controller.
Access controls are well above average as you can restrict access to all shares with an optional password or use local user and group memberships: allowing read and write access to specific shares to be determined by privilege. In Domain mode the appliance can use a designated domain controller and Active Directory Services to authenticate users. Each mode also supports a range of disk quotas which can be applied to individual users or groups and extensive alerting facilities allow emails to be sent when quotas are being reached.
Recovery
At the end of our testing, we did a “plugs out” test in which we unceremoniously disconnected power from the unit during a transfer — no graceful power down, no waiting for the file transfer to complete. We simply pulled the plug to see what would happen. — Pulling the power from a RAID array is one of the cardinal sins of network administration — doing it while you KNOW the unit is transferring files is typically punishable by uberGeek death.
When we powered the unit back on, we expected the array to be inaccessible while a complete resynchronization of the array took place… not so. We were able to jump back onto the device and, except for the file that was being copied to the array at the time of the power failure, all of our data was intact. Some resynching was required, but once again the unit stayed accessible during the automatic rebuild.
Green Storage
With the growing popularity of servers that sip rather than chug power while still providing great performance, it is nice to hear that Infrant has designed their gear with power saving in mind.
Power savings with the NV+ are quite pronounced. With all the drives chugging away at full speed, the NV+ drew a maximum of 63 watts with an average of 55 watts under moderate usage. By comparison one of our barebones PIII Linux servers with 4 drives in a RAID 5 array draws 145 watts.
Conclusion
Packed with technology previously reserved for upper-echelon NAS servers (i.e. RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, Dynamic RAID, Continuous System Monitoring and Backup capabilities), the ReadyNAS NV+ brings Enterprise-level technology to the masses at a price that small businesses and home users alike can afford. The ReadyNAS NV+ is storage and backup solution that will virtually ensure that your data will never again be lost to hardware failure.
From the integrated LCD status panel to the small size and noise footprint, to its near-universal support of Operating Systems and protocols, the NV+ is a winner. Infrant has definitely captured the class crown for performance and ease of use. Without a doubt, the NV+ is THE Superior NAS solution for Home and SMB deployments.
