Welcome to ‘gadget’ @ TheTechStop.net —- It’s time to get your Geek On!
gadget — Episode 096 – The Netgear ReadyNAS Pro
|
For your convenience, ‘gadget’ is available in several formats. If there is a format that you would like to see us offer, please write us at ‘gadget@TheTechStop.net’ Thanks for watching!
|
The Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition is Netgear’s latest entry into the Network Attached Storage world. The Pro expands on Netgear’s “vertically expandable” ideology of storage, letting you expand the array from a single hot-swappable SATA drive to up to six drives in the RAID modes that best serves your needs.
While the ReadyNAS Pro might look like a larger, darker cousin of the NV+, it’s actually an entirely new beast. Opening up the left side of the unit, you can quickly see that Netgear has decided to up the firepower in the Pro by moving away from the power-efficient but slower dedicated silicon that drove the earlier ReadyNAS units and instead used an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU surrounded by 1GB of DDR2 memory, with a second DIMM slot available for those tinkerers who want more memory.
|
The increased CPU power of the ReadyNAS Pro isn’t just for the sake of specs. That extra horsepower really does make a difference in the way the ReadyNAS Pro operates. File System checks that would take 30 minutes on an 1100 can be completed in 3 or less on a Pro. Array resynchronizations, necessary after a loss of power or other RAID error, happen in minutes instead of hours. In fact, there are no operations of the ReadyNAS Pro that are not faster that its predecessors.
Opening up the right panel of the enclosure reveals the drive cage, SATA drive backplane and a MiniATX power supply. The back of the ReadyNAS Pro has two USB ports (for connecting hard drives, flash drives, or printers) as well as two Gigabit Ethernet ports above a kensington lock port. The power supply is internal and uses a standard power plug. Netgear decided to build two oversized fans into the ReadyNAS Pro. Their size al lows them to move more air through the enclosure while spinning the blades at lower speeds. The end result is much less operational noise. Setting up the ReadyNAS pro starts with an installation of your SATA drives into the provided caddies. These caddies are locked into the array via a button released lever and they slide quite easily into and out of the unit. This means that you could upgade your array from 1.5TB using three 500 GB drives, to 6TB using 1TB drives… all without ever having to power down the unit or copy any of your data off the array. That same technology will allow the array to recover from a bad or removed drive without any user intervention. — With the ReadyNAS, it’s automatic. The OLED screen on the face of the unit is actually a very useful tool. The screen gives you a tremendous amount of “at a glance” information about your array. It can tell you the IP address of your unit, the status of the various drives, any errors that may be logged and the current actions being taken by OS. Upon startup, the Pro will go through a 50 second system check that includes verifying the available drives, checking the File system and displaying the IP address of the unit. |
The first time you power up the ReadyNAS Pro, you’ll be able to use the RAIDar software to initialize the array into whatever mode best suits your needs. The Pro supports RAID 0,1,5,6 and X-RAID2 the dynamically resizable option that makes the ReadyNAS line so popular. The Pro will automatically detect how many drives you have and will automatically give you options for the available storage.
Once you’ve logged into the UI you can control pretty much every aspect of the ReadyNAS Pro from date and time, to the performance options, language settings, update services, power options, logs and health screens. The menu system is intuitive, easy to navigate, and fast. You can effortlessly switch between the network settings and the services tab and everything is explained in semi-laymen terminology.
Speaking of services, this is one of the areas in which the ReadyNAS excels. You have your choice of all the standard file sharing protocols like CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and RSYNC — pretty much guaranteeing that you will be able to communicate with the Pro no matter what OS you’re using.
|
You are also provided with a plethora of streaming services like Squeeze Center, iTunes Streaming Server, Universal Plug and Play for Audio Video, and the Home Media Streaming Server, These services will allow you to stream your music, videos, movies and pictures over your network to any connected and compatible media devices, essentially tuning your Pro into a digital media jukebox. Netgear has also integrated ReadyNAS Photos, which give you an easy way to publish your photos on your Pro to be shared with family and friends over the Internet.
The USB support for the ReadyNAS Pro is impressive. We used several different hard drives, three different USB printers and a dozen or so flash drives, USB hubs and the like. All of our devices linked up with the Pro without issue. One thing that Netgear has added is the ability to automatically have the ReadyNAS transfer the contents of a flash drive to a directory on the array simply by plugging it into the unit — This is a great option for those who want a quick way to backup their on-the-go storage. Speaking of backup, the ReadyNAS is a natural at backing up your data. The control panel includes a section that allows you to specify directories that are shared across you network. You can automatically schedule the ReadyNAS Pro to backup those directories at your convenience or when your network is least being used. If I can up the uberGeek level just a bit, I want to point out two features in the network tab of the ReadyNAS Pro. The first feature is the support of VLANs, and jumbo frames: With the right switch, you can create a Virtual Local Area Network that can selectively give physical access to the PRO only from certain switch ports. Combined with Jumbo Frames, which will up your transfer rates, the pro gives you an easy way to be more secure and faster. The second feature in the network tab is the support of bonding, or what Netgear calls “Teaming.” Those 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports on the ReadyNAS Pro can be setup in a variety of configurations: You can ask the Pro to adaptively balance traffic across the two ports to maximize transfer rates, or you can go with a round-robin scheme of bonding. You could also save the second port for failover, just in case you lose an interface. You choose according to your network setup and the level of redundancy you need vs. sheer performance. Now to the ever-important question of performance… We found ourselves in a predicament in benchmarking the ReadyNAS Pro because of one simple problem… none of our testing gear was able to keep up with the sustained transfer rate of the Pro. Thankfully Netgear continued Infrant’s support of the grassroots ReadyNAS community, essentially a dedicated group of the most uber of uberGeeks who are in a large part responsible for making the ReadyNAS as good as it is. |
One of the ReadyNAS Beta testers, Alexander Liebau (Lee-Bow), benchmarked the Pro against a 10,000rpm Enterprise-Class Western Digital Raptor hard drive. The Raptor is one of the fastest hard drives on the planet… and it got clobbered by the Pro. With the box still running BETA firmware and without the “teaming” mode enabled, he was able to get transfer rates in excess of 100 MegaBYTES per second. That’s 800 Megabits per second, pretty much the maximum throughput that a Gigabit Ethernet connection is capable of. — In fact, he was only able to get these results because he used a 2GB RAMDISK to supply the source data: a hard drive was just too slow.
The NETGEAR ReadyNAS Pro is available now, September 19th, 2008 at a list price that starts at ~$1700 for the Business edition with three 500GB drives. Street prices should be lower at your favorite online or retail merchant and Netgear guarantees the ReadyNAS Pro for 5-years.
