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gadget — Episode 118 – The Netgear ReadyNAS NVX
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The ReadyNAS NVX Business Edition is a 4-bay, hot-swappable, high-performance Network Attached RAID: the latest entry in Netgear’s growing business-centric line of storage products. Like the ReadyNAS Pro, the NVX is aimed more towards the small-to-medium sized business than to the consumer or power user, but that’s not to say that the uberGeek power user isn’t going to want one! Out of the box you’ll find everything you need to get up and online in minutes. Our review unit came with two 500GB enterprise-class Seagate drives, but you can also buy the NVX fully populated with up to 6TB of storage using 1.5TB drives, with 2 and 2.5GB drives just around the corner.
The front of the NVX sports the power switch, status lights for the hard drives, a one touch backup button, a USB port for external storage devices and a small LCD display at the bottom of the unit.
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Opening the front panel of the NVX reveals four quick-release caddies. These are an improvement over the caddies included with previous generations of the ReadyNAS, with locking mechanisms that seem easier to manipulate and a rail system that is much smoother in loading and unloading the drives.
The back of the NVX has an oversized fan, a power socket, a Kensington locking port for securing your NVX, a handle, and the USB and Ethernet ports. One of the most visible upgrades of the NVX over the NV+ is the inclusion of two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Two ports means that you can bond two Gigabit connections for greater speed, dedicate a port to failover for greater reliability, or use the NVX for additional services that would be unavailable in a single port unit. Removing four screws gives you access to pretty much everything under the hood. The ReadyNAS NVX may be cosmetically similar to the 3-year old ReadyNAS NV+, but a few key upgrades have been made to the CPU, chipset, network and RAID hardware. The NVX has a single SO-DIMM slot at the top of the unit that will accept DDR2 modules. Our unit came with a Gigabyte of memory, but you can easily upgrade it to 2GB should you need extra memory for plugins or services. Opening the back of the NVX, you’ll find a clean backplane with just the electronics needed to power the hard drives. The heavy lifting is done by a small motherboard at the top of the unit that contains everything from the processor to the Ethernet ports, drive logic and control interface. The NVX uses an Intel Tolapai processor to speed RAID functions while decreasing power consumption. Speaking of power consumption, the NVX is quite frugal with its power budget. At full operation with all four drives installed, we averaged a power consumption of about 67 watts. Allowing the unit to sleep dropped the consumption as low as 7 watts. Like the NV+ and the Pro, the LCD on the ReadyNAS is actually a great selling point. It provides at-a-glance access to information like the IP address of the unit, available storage space, errors and unit status. Like the other products in Netgear’s ReadyNAS line, installing drives is made simple thanks to the hot-swappable caddies. Simply place the hard drive in the caddy, secure it with four screws, then plug the assembly into one of the drive slots. The NVX will automatically detect the new drive and give you the option of expanding the existing array or creating a new volume. |
If you’ve ever used a ReadyNAS, you’ll be well equipped to use the web-based GUI of the NVX since Netgear has standardized the UI across their product line. Once you’re logged in you’ll be able to control everything from date and time, to network parameters, the performance options, language, power options, and at least three dozen other settings. You’ll be able to check logs, see the status of your array, toggle VLANs or Jumbo Frames, install and configure plugins, create volumes, choose between simple and advance user authentication and pretty much everything else you might want in a NAS. The UI is intuitive, and fast. Even a first-timer should quickly be able to navigate and fully configure the NVX in under an hour.
While the UI is a standout feature of the ReadyNAS line it’s not the only one done right on Netgear’s boxes. NVX supports a dizzying array of services, plugins and multimedia options that are available for the OS. For basic file sharing the NVX supports CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. It can be used with Windows, Linux and Mac clients. For all you Apple users, the NVX is compatible with Time Machine and supports auto-detection through Bonjour or Universal Plug and Play, meaning that the NVX can quickly become THE device that handles storage, printers, and streaming services in your network no matter what Operating System you might be running on your clients.
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The NVX is also packed with a number of default streaming services like Squeeze Center, iTunes Streaming Server, Universal Plug and Play for Audio Video, and the Home Media Streaming Server. Used in conjunction with readily available plugins, you’ll be able to use your NVX to stream music, videos, movies and pictures over the network to compatible media devices.
If you’re looking for an easy and comprehensive backup solution, that’s another area in which the ReadyNAS line excels. The software built into the NVX can automatically backup any networked device to any network-connected storage, regardless of your Operating System or security setup. As long as the NVX can “see” what is to be backed up and to where it will copy the files, it can be setup to perform a series of unattended backups according to your schedule. This comes in very handy if you’re trying to backup multiple computers on off-hours without having to install individual backup clients on each workstation. As with all the ReadyNAS units, Netgear has include an extensive selection of drivers for USB products ranging from external hard drives to USB flash drives to printers and USB multifunction devices. For those who want true remote backup “in the cloud”, Netgear has just announced the “ReadyNAS Vault” : a service that promises cloud computing for the masses. More than just an online storage center, ReadyNAS Vault allows for remote replication of your connected ReadyNAS devices AND remote management of those devices from a single interface. — Were you to be in charge of managing a series of Business-Class ReadyNAS devices, say a dozen ReadyNAS Pros and a few NVXs, you would get a single unified web interface that would give you at-a-glance status for all your ReadyNAS units. – We’ll be reviewing ReadyNAS Vault in a future episode of ‘gadget’, but from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like a winner. A note about performance: In our tests using IOMeter we maxed out the transfer rate of the NVX at ~73MBps reading throughput and 75MBps write. Transfer rates with the NVX are definitely faster than the NV+, which averaged ~30MBps, but slower than the ReadyNAS Pro which topped out at more than 100MBps. The performance difference between the NVX and the PRO is due to the extra firepower that the Pro has under the hood. That also means that restriping, resizing or resyncing the NVX is MUCH slower than with the Pro. |
This isn’t to say that the NVX is slow, but if you are choosing between the NVX and the Pro, you should understand up front that you are trading speed for lower cost and reduced power consumption.
The Netgear ReadyNAS NVX Business Edition is available now. Prices start at $1000 for the NVX with two Enterprise-Class 500GB hard drives.
