The ReadyNAS Pro 6 -
NETGEAR is not playing around with the design of the ReadyNAS Pro 6. It is built more like a PC than a NAS and has some very PC like features and components. The front if the box is fairly clean and simple with only a power button, USB 2.0 port, backup button and product labels showing. At the top (behind the clear static protector) is an LED screen that while informative is also very retro and utilitarian.

Behind the front door there is not much more to see except for the stacked 2 x 3 drive bays. This is an interesting choice in design here and when we first saw it we thought of dual RAID controllers, but at this price range there is no chance of that. Instead this is more for stability and cooling than anything else. It is still a nice design though. Each of the drives pops out very easily by pressing the bottom of the latch. Reinserting them can be tricky as you have metal on metal here so it can bind up. When it does you might have to remove and reinsert the tray.

Moving around to the back we have a very large fan that although low RPM can still move a good deal of air. Below this is a fan for the 300 Watt Seasonic PSU. Also visible in this picture are two USB 2.0 ports and the dual Gbe LAN ports. These ports support failover as well as LACP (802.3ad) to increase throughput. You will need to make sure your router or switch supports this or you will not be able to communicate with it once it is enabled.

Taking a closer look inside you will find some nice touches in the design of the ReadyNAS Pro 6. Here you can see that the backplane is vented for better air flow. Although we have seen this before it is not all that common and is a nice touch.

Taking a look at the motherboard you can see what we mean about this being more like a PC than just a NAS. The ReadyNAS Pro uses an LGA 775 motherboard and CPU for its power. This means two full sized DIMM slots and all of the fun stuff that runs it.

The CPU in this model is an Intel Pentium E5388 Dual Core CPU with a clock speed of 2.6GHz and an FSB of 800 MHz. On the Mini-ITX motherboard there is an Intel 965 memory controller to run the 1GB of DDR2 667 memory. For the six SATA 2 ports NETGEAR went with an Intel ICH8R I/O controller. This is still a good controller although a little dated. Like we said this is much more like a PC than a NAS. We have noticed that many newer NAS devices are lowering the CPU power they use and making do with Intel Atom CPUs (and highly optimized code running it). This gives them access to newer I/O controllers like the ICH10R which is a little more powerful, but you lose on some of the raw CPU power for RAID calculations.

For more details on the ReadNAS Pro 6 you can check out the video below.