The ReadyNAS Pro is new six-drive NAS platform for NETGEAR, using an Intel E2160 Dual-Core 1.8GHz instead of the proprietary Infrant processor that has powered the ReadyNAS line to date.
The Pro comes with 1 GB of DDR2 RAM that is user-upgradeable to a total of 4 GB and runs the latest version of the ReadyNAS RAIDiator OS. It currently comes in 1.5, 3 and 6 TB models, each with three of the six 3.5" SATA drive bays populated. A diskless "Pioneer" model is on tap for later this year, which will have a lower price and reduced feature set. The Pro’s volumes can be configured using NETGEAR’s proprietary auto-expandable X-RAID2 or standard RAID 0, 1, 5 and 6.
LAN connection is via two 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports that support jumbo frames up to 9K. The two ports can be configured in a variety of failover, load-balancing and aggregation modes. There are three USB ports for storage expansion, but no eSATA ports.
Power consumption is around 68 W with three drives installed, dropping to 44 W when idle drive spindown kicks in. Fan and drive noise is surprisingly low considering the three fans (case, power supply and CPU) and multiple drives.
CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS network file systems are supported, and you can join Microsoft NT domains or Active Directory for user authentication. UPnP AV, Logitech SqueezeCenter, and iTunes media servers are available as well as USB printer and FTP servers.
Many backup options are available including remote, scheduled network backup of clients and shares via CIFS / NFS / FTP / HTTP & Rsync and to / from attached USB drives. NTI Shadow backup licenses are also bundled for additional client backup options.
RAID 5 write performance with a gigabit LAN connection averaged 39 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB, while read performance for the same conditions measured 43 MB/s. This ranks the Pro in the Top 5 of RAID5 NASes tested to date.