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Hardware wise, the 1100 is totally different than the NV+. It uses four hot-swappable SATA drives in caddies, but they aren’t the same size caddies as are used in the NV+ meaning that they are not mechanically compatible. However, they ARE file structure and RAID compatible: you could take the drives from a NV+ and read them in a 1100, or vice versa. This is a nice feature across the ReadyNAS line of products that ensures you will be able to read your data even in the event of a catastrophic NAS failure.

The 1100 is designed to used RAID 5 with an X-RAID implementation. This means that the volumes can be dynamically resized without having losing access to your data. Our tests of NV+ proved that this system worked when we pulled a drive out of the array and maintained several video streams without any loss of data. The ReadyNAS automatically sensed the failure and reconfigured itself to fit the data on the three remaining drives.

What we didn’t mention in the NV+ review is that X-RAID allows you to upgrade the drives in the array, one drive at a time, without having to backup your data. You simple replace one drive after another, allowing the ReadyNAS to resync your data each time until you have replaced all the drives. This is a great feature that lets you upgrade your NAS without worrying about copying your data back and forth across the network.

Like the NV+, the 1100 features USB ports on both the front and back of the NAS. You can use these ports to increase you availible storage, connect an external backup storage device, or connect USB peripherals such as printers. The 1100 also features DUAL Gigabit Ethernet ports and a full complement of drive, network and power status lights on the front panel for at-a-glance status of the NAS.

The 1100 includes several features that make it a natural choice for a Data Center. First, the 1u unit is so shallow that a standard 19″ rack can fit two of them, back-to-back. Populated with 1TB SATA drives, 4u of ReadyNAS 1100 can contain 32TB of RAID 5 storage. Balanced over a network load balancer/accelerator, and you have an incredibly high-perfomance solution that scales incredibly well.

The “Padre” chipset in the ReadyNAS 1100 is unique in that is supports 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to 8 SATA channels. Even though the raw processing power is slightly less than the “P0″ chipset in the NV+, the additional SATA channels and the optimized network transfer speeds make any reduction in overall performance minimal.