Given the numerous amount of computing devices I’ve had pretty much all of my adult life, I’ve finally decided once and for all to forgo backing up locally and purchasing a NAS appliance. In the past I’ve assembled DIY NAS’s at home (FreeNas, for example, Windows servers, etc) and have gotten to the point where I want an easy, self-managing appliance. Home NAS’s now are really quite advanced, and many have some very useful features beyond merely shared storage, such as the ability to act as a print server (plug a printer into a USB device), DLNA servers (stream media), etc. After some research I decided I liked the ReadyNas line most, and started figuring out which ReadyNas was for me.
I quickly discovered that there are *many* ReadyNas products, and the differences between them can be subtle. I really could have used an online “guide” or “wizard” to help me decided what I needed … after hours of research (including speaking to a VAR and Netgear pre-sales support) here’s what I’ve discovered. These are just raw notes, and not meant to be an article or guide:
Comparison chart: http://www.readynas.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ReadyNAS_Comparison_Home.pdf
Drive Compatability list: http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82
The “Ultra” line uses intel atoms. The NV+ and non-ultra line uses Sparcs, which their pre-sales say is slower, use intels for better throughput and definitely for any media streaming.
The Ultra lines have the “normal” (ie 2 Ultra) and “Plus” (ie 2 Ultra Plus), the Plus is a dual-core atom processor, everything else is the same.
Software features appear to be the same across the line.
The X-Raid gives it theDrobo-like functionality of mish-mashing drive sizes.
Ultra line does not do AD integration.
Only the ultra 2 offers a usb 3.0 port for higher speed peripherals in case you wanted to plug a usb drive and share it via your nas. Not sure why one would do that, or perhaps for faster initial loading ?
Of the Ultra’s, only Ultra 4 and Ultra 6 offer Raid 5.
The “2″, “4″ and “6″ in Ultra refer to bays.
Ultra 6 (and apparently only the 6 ? ) can have an drives in chassis spec’d as a hot spare. <— This can buy some time in case a drive fails while away from the NAS. This becomes important when you’re on a trip and if a drive fails and you aren’t there to see it your storage could spend days or weeks in a situation where it has no additional fault tolerance.
They all use consumer grade drives, not “enterprise” (according to a review, haven’t looked at actual supplied drives)
Can buy diskless chassis and populate drives myself; be sure to read compatability chart.
Big question: with an existing 2 tb or data, how much capacity doI need for right now, and for future growth ?
More notes to come as I research more … I’m leaning heavily towards the Ultra 6 at thispoint, but it is pretty darn expensive, over a grand with 6tb of disks, and that may just be as a non-redundant volume.
