Once you connect the unit to the network and power it on, you need to discover it and configure it with Netgear's RAIDar utility that can install on any Windows, Linux or Mac. The drives mount in hot-swappable drive sleds for easy removal. The ReadyNAS 2100 test unit reviewed is a 2 TB model that came with four 500 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM 16 MB cache 3 Gbps 3.5-inch SATA drives. The rear of the ReadyNAS 2100 has two network ports and three USB ports. The backup button can be used to copy the data from the backup share to an attached USB device or can be programmed to run backup jobs as well. The front of the 2100 has a USB port, LED lights for drives, network, activity, USB and UID and buttons for system reset, power and backup. The pieces connect via an easily removable backplane that NetGear calls the X-Change system.
The back half contains all the components such as the power supplies, disk controller, NICs, CPU and memory. The front half of the ReadyNAS 2100 is the hard drive cage. The advantage X-RAID2 provides over traditional RAID is automatic volume expansion and support for mixed drive sizes in the RAID group. Besides the traditional RAID levels, the 2100 also supports NetGear's proprietary RAID technology called X-RAID2 that uses a unified RAID level and supports only a single volume.
The 2100 supports RAID levels of 0, 1 and 5 using NetGear's Flex-RAID, which supports multiple volumes. While the unit can be mounted in a standard 19" rack, it is only 12.5" deep so it can easily be placed on a shelf or a desk it also has a fairly small footprint. One big reason for this is reliability all the drives on their list have the Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) feature for maximum reliability and performance. While most 3 Gbps SATA hard drives (currently there's no support for 6 Gbps) will work in the ReadyNAS 2100, NetGear only recommends certain manufacturer and model drives that are listed on their compatibility list. The ReadyNAS 2100 is sold in three different drive configurations with either four 500 GB, 1 TB or 2 TB hard drives for a total raw disk capacity of 2 TB, 4 TB or 8 TB. This allows ReadyNAS devices to replicate either all data or selected data to other ReadyNAS devices - this allows having a remote off-site copy of the data.
Most of the ReadyNAS models have the same feature and protocol support the main differences between them are the hardware specifications outlined below: ModelĪn optional on all the units is the ReadyNAS Replicate, which is a software license that enables the built-in replication feature on the devices.
The NetGear ReadyNAS family of devices range from their small two-drive ReadyNAS Pro desktop units up to the larger 12-drive ReadyNAS 4200 rack mount units.
Most units support a wide variety of protocols that can be used to connect to the NAS unit, such as Windows CIFS/SMB, iSCSI, NFS, Apple's AFP, FTP and more. They can range from small one-drive units to multi-drive units that support multiple RAID levels to protect against disk failures. NAS units are dedicated standalone units that attach to your network and contain both disk controllers and hard disks all in one unit that can be accessed by any device on the network. An attractive alternative to complex and expensive storage area networks (SANs) for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are network-attached storage (NAS) units. Shared storage enables collaboration, document sharing and is a key requirement for many advanced features in virtualization. Having shared storage is a must for most IT environments, whether they are large or small.