Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ (RND4425)
Substantial and reliable storage- Netgear’s ReadyNAS seems to offer everything you might need for your network. Ian Waugh goes on a RAID…
| Product | ReadyNAS NV+ (RND4425) |
|---|---|
| Company | Netgear |
| Web | www.netgear.co.uk |
| Price | from £468. System reviewed £598 |
| We like | Easy set up, X-RAID technology, networks USB printers |
| We don't like | Manual on disk |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements | Windows/Linux PC, Mac |
For an introduction to NAS, see here.
ReadyNAS was developed by Californian company Infrant which was recently acquired by Netgear. Infrant specialises in NAS systems so maybe we can expect some interesting storage products from Netgear.
The ReadyNAS is a RAID-based NAS device with four drive bays. It’s solidly built from steel and quite heavy but also compact. And it actually looks quite smart, not the sort of unit you’d necessarily want to hide away.
Having said that, it has a cooling fan at the back which, while not particularly noisy (although it does change speed according to load which increases the noise), would be noticeable in a quiet environment.
There’s a power socket the back, a Gigabit Ethernet port and two USB sockets. Another USB socket on the front is used with a programmable Backup button, allowing you to backup to an attached USB drive.
Four LEDs show which drives are online and at the bottom there’s a backlit LCD which tells you what’s happening during boot-up and then shows the unit’s IP address and the amount of free space. The LCD switches off after a few minute but can be activated again by pressing the power button.
The system can currently be supplied with two or four 250Gb or 500Gb drives. It can also be supplied without drives in which case you’d need to add your own. Our review model had 4 x 250Gb drives.
The system supports RAID 0, 1 and 5 arrays (see here for details).
The drives in the unit are hot swappable (you can remove and replace them without switching the system off) and, using Netgear's custom X-RAID technology, you can start with one drive and add other drives as your requirements increase. It works like this - with one drive there's no redundancy. Add a second drive and that's set up as a mirror of the first. Add a third drive and you double the capacity; a fourth drive then triples it.
You can also swap out small drives for larger ones. If you want to upgrade, you can do so without taking the system offline. The swapping process can take a while but it’s a brilliant feature.
Installation is a matter of plugging into the mains, connecting the Ethernet port to your router or hub, and running the installation CD on a computer. This installs a RAIDar (radar- geddit!) utility which makes ReadyNAS show up in the network and here you can make and change settings from a browser-based interface.
At a basic level you simply add shares (folders) for use by the network but you can also set up users, passwords, disk quotas and so on.
The package includes Retrospect software for backing up, but backup facilities are also integrated into ReadyNAS. You can schedule automatic backup to a USB drive (see above) and define volume snapshots (complete backup).
ReadyNAS is compatible with Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux systems and supports FTP. It includes a range of media servers which can stream to a network media player without going through a PC. These include SlimServer, iTunes, UPnP and DLNA.
The USB sockets on the back can be used to add an external USB drive which will then appear to all computers on the network. They can also be used to add a USB printer to the network, saving the cost of a printer with an Ethernet connection.
One very useful feature is the ability to send you an email if something goes wrong. Say a drive dies, or the system is running low on space - if the unit is hidden away you’re unlikely to know, but the system can email you to tell you.
Niggles are few. Like too many pieces of hardware and software, the manual is on the CD. For a high-cost item like this, it’s penny-pinching in the extreme. Also, there’s no ‘sleep’ facility which infrequent users might wish for or if the unit is used in a quiet environment.
Conclusion
The ReadyNAS NV+ is a superb NAS solution with built-in expandability and hot-swapping which makes management a doddle. The price is reasonable given the cost of current RAID systems; RAID still commands a premium over single drive systems.
If you want secure backup, storage and streaming facilities, the ReadyNAS will do it all. Highly recommended.
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