Netgear's Marvell Based ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Review

In addition to the raw performance numbers, there are a number of other features which prospective customers might care about. These include the one-touch backup features, extensibility with the help of add-ons and mobile apps availability. Power consumption and noise are important factors too.

One Touch Backup

Backup jobs can be created in the web interface. Source and destination options include folders in the internal volume as well as the various USB ports in the system. These backup jobs can be scheduled at pre-determined intervals or even just disabled.

The one-touch backup button can be configured to execute one or more of the configured backup jobs. We set up a backup job to copy over the contents of the drive connected to the rear top USB 3.0 port to a backup folder in the internal volume. One touch backup was performed for 100 GB of data (with multiple small files and folders) on a OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 SSD. As can be seen in the gallery above, the backup jobs use 'cp' internally. The WD MyBook Live uses the rsync command which gives more flexibility in the backup process. This is something Netgear should probably look at in future firmware upgrades. The transfer rates for the NV+ v2 (with various volume configurations) are recorded below.

The backup transfer rate seems to be fundamentally limited by the RAID array itself, as evident from the NASPT / robocopy benchmarks and the results above.

Add-Ons

One of the big plus points of the ReadyNAS lineup is the wealth of community developed add-ons available. A visit to the ReadyNAS website reveals that almost every add-on has two versions available, one for x86 and the other for SPARC. With today's introductions, ARM versions need to be added too. As of now, the number of add-ons available for the new platform is quite limited.

Netgear assured us that the porting process for the add-ons would be simple and available to end users / developers with access to the SDK. For the purpose of this review, we used the EnableRootSSH, ReadyNAS Photos II and ReadyNAS Remote add-ons. Except for the EnableRootSSH add-on, the others needed quite a bit of poking around to get them up and running. I am quite sure that things will improve as the ARM based platforms go out to more developers / end-users.

The ReadyNAS Photos II add-on helps users manage photographs on the NAS and access to it over the Internet. With uPnP forwarding set up, each photographer account on the NAS can be accessed through photos.readynas.com. The add-on also provides very fine grained access control for the photographs. Other NAS vendors also provide similar add-ons (like Synology with their Photo Station app). Due to the large number of options available, the usage of the add-on is not as straightforward as I would have liked. That said, it does manage to get the job done.

Mobile Apps / Remote Access Add-On

The ReadyNAS Remote solution allows access to the NAS volumes from a PC / Mac / mobile device in an external network. This needs the FTP service to be enabled on the unit (Netgear indicated that a non-FTP based version is currently being developed for mobile devices). The PC client installs its own network adapter on the system. I was unable to get the client to install on my Windows 7 Ultimate x86 based laptop, but it installed fine on another PC running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (albeit, with an unsigned driver warning). Once logged in, the client mapped the NAS volume onto a network location. This way, the NAS volume is integrated quite nicely with Windows Explorer. All said, this setup is much more complicated compared to the PC WD2go solution provided by Western Digital in their MyBook Live lineup.

Mobile apps to replicate the remote access functionality are available for both Android and iOS. One of the quirks I observed during the testing was the fact that the PC client would log out whenever I logged into the Android client. In most situations, this is not desirable, but it is not a showstopper. Users can always create separate accounts for access via mobile devices. All in all, the mobile apps / remote access add-on seem to be unnecessarily complicated. Hopefully, things get better in the future.

DLNA

The web interface allows the various folders to be configured with the ReadyDLNA service. The unit is still pending certification, though. I am not a big fan of DLNA and its certification program. So, I will leave this sub-section with just the fact that DLNA services can be configured on a per-folder basis in the ReadyNAS NV+ v2.

Power Consumption

The table below presents the power consumed by the unit in various stages of operation. Note that these are typical numbers and can vary in the field depending on the type of hard disk being used in the system.

Since the unit happens to be based on a dedicated RISC based RAID / NAS controller, the power consumption is quite low. The hard disks contribute to the bulk of the power consumption. The temperatures never exceeded 40 C, and the fans rotated at less than 2000 rpm even during periods of heavy activity.