We have our third victim… um test subject in our continuing Network Attached Storage (NAS) device reviews. This time it is from a company with a fair recognizable name in the industry, NETGEAR. For many the name NETGEAR means low cost consumer networking products and maybe a lower reliability rating. We have to agree that some of that reputation was rightfully earned in the past, but they have since changed things around and are now making some fairly solid products for the consumer, SMBs and the enterprise. We have already covered their ProSafe WNDAP360 wireless access point and found it to be a well put together product. Now we are going to dive into their pro line of NAS products with the ReadNAS Pro 6. This is a 6 bay device that can support up to 12TB of RAW storage and has more than its share of features to boot. So let’s take a look at what you get with the ReadyNAS Pro 6 from NETGEAR.
Features -Although we covered the details of the ReadyNAS Pro build we did not go too deep into the features it offers. Some of these features will be very important to anyone interested in this level of product. One of the big ones that caught our eye was the support for VMware through NFS or iSCSI. Both of these protocols allow you to make secure connections to the ReadyNAS Pro from one or more servers. This makes the ReadyNAS Pro a low cost (relatively) option for anyone looking to build a VMware cluster.
NETGEAR has also built in their own Hybrid RAID to allow you to make the most of the RAW storage space you have available. If you use the Hybrid RAID (Called X-RAID) you can get up to 9.2GB of usable storage and still maintain redundancy in the event of a drive failure. This is a very nice feature and one that is gaining traction in the market (we saw this with Synology’s DS1512+).
Weill cover all of the features in more detail in part two of our review of the ReadyNAS Pro 6, but will give you a listing here to keep you interested.
