Infrant Technologies’ ReadyNAS NV: Enterprise Features, Desktop Footprint
by Purav Sanghani on March 17, 2006 11:42 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Thoughts
Since we did not have any set top media players, we could not test the functionality of the UPnP capability implemented into the ReadyNAS devices. However, from all of the other capabilities that we were able to see, both the ReadyNAS NV and the older X6 have an extremely high degree of configurability compared to some of the other desktop/small office network attached storage devices out there that we have come across.
At first glance, we were extremely impressed with the easier-to-use hot swap drive bay feature that Infrant implemented with this model, especially because the device contained so many enterprise-like features such as RAID hot swap where if a drive in an array fails, it can be easily replaced without the need to rebuild the array. Also, for those who have the X6 or even the 600 series ReadyNAS devices, if you are looking to upgrade to the NV, Infrant makes it simple by allowing you to move your current drive set to the new device without the need to rebuild the array because the same software is used on all devices.
Our benchmarks showed great improvement of the ReadyNAS NV over the X6 model, especially in the Iozone “write” tests. Transferring a 512MB or 1GB file showed increased performance over the X6, which was expected from what Infrant had told us. Though the read tests did not prove much of anything, it was clear from all of the synthetic tests that Infrant put a lot of effort into making the NV model easier to use in the desktop environment as well as perform better in all types of environments. SiSoft Sandra and Iometer as well as our own homebrew File Copy tests showed improvement in all areas, which is reason enough to go with the ReadyNAS NV over the X6 model.
The ReadyNAS NV comes in 3 flavors including a core unit with no drives at a retail price of $649, a 1TB (terabyte) version that retails for $1199, a 1.6TB version at $1699, and a 2TB version at $2299. The 2TB version includes four Seagate 7200.9 500GB hard drives and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the ReadyNAS supporting higher capacity drives as they come out. We can’t wait to see 3-4TBs sitting on our desktops soon!
Since we did not have any set top media players, we could not test the functionality of the UPnP capability implemented into the ReadyNAS devices. However, from all of the other capabilities that we were able to see, both the ReadyNAS NV and the older X6 have an extremely high degree of configurability compared to some of the other desktop/small office network attached storage devices out there that we have come across.
At first glance, we were extremely impressed with the easier-to-use hot swap drive bay feature that Infrant implemented with this model, especially because the device contained so many enterprise-like features such as RAID hot swap where if a drive in an array fails, it can be easily replaced without the need to rebuild the array. Also, for those who have the X6 or even the 600 series ReadyNAS devices, if you are looking to upgrade to the NV, Infrant makes it simple by allowing you to move your current drive set to the new device without the need to rebuild the array because the same software is used on all devices.
Our benchmarks showed great improvement of the ReadyNAS NV over the X6 model, especially in the Iozone “write” tests. Transferring a 512MB or 1GB file showed increased performance over the X6, which was expected from what Infrant had told us. Though the read tests did not prove much of anything, it was clear from all of the synthetic tests that Infrant put a lot of effort into making the NV model easier to use in the desktop environment as well as perform better in all types of environments. SiSoft Sandra and Iometer as well as our own homebrew File Copy tests showed improvement in all areas, which is reason enough to go with the ReadyNAS NV over the X6 model.
The ReadyNAS NV comes in 3 flavors including a core unit with no drives at a retail price of $649, a 1TB (terabyte) version that retails for $1199, a 1.6TB version at $1699, and a 2TB version at $2299. The 2TB version includes four Seagate 7200.9 500GB hard drives and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the ReadyNAS supporting higher capacity drives as they come out. We can’t wait to see 3-4TBs sitting on our desktops soon!
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MikeRocker - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
Sorry, couldn't resist the joke. ;-) Maybe 'perforated' is a more accurate description.Nice piece of kit, though it gets owned by the RAID performance-wise. How much is that actually down to the network interface? Pity its so expensive too.
brownba - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
ehhh, looks like a space heater to melatrosicarius - Monday, March 20, 2006 - link
I bought one about a month ago. It's good b/c it has RAID-5 on a Gigabit connection. It's small and looks awesome, but the fan is loud as s***. It's basically a micro Linux box.Anyway, I use it as a BACKUP only, b/c it doesn't have a "real" CPU or Mobo and is a tad slow to work from directly. For my Server, I use a real PC with four identical slave drives, also in RAID-5, so the backup can be 1:1. I wish it had RAID-6 b/c my Arcea 1210 RAID controller card in my server has the possibility of RAID-6.
Just FYI, four 300GB Maxtor MaxLineIII 7200RPM SATA drives do work great, even tho they are not listed on the Infrant HW compatability page. It will give you a 1.2TB array (1200GB) of total space if you stripe the 4 drives (RAID-0), and Will give you around 850GB if you use RAID-5 (one quarter of each drive is reserved to cache a third of each other drive so one drive can fail without any data loss.)