Get back in your shell, you cirriped
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Netgear Readynas Ultra 4
Product Netgear Readynas Ultra 4
Website www.netgear.co.uk/rndu4000.php?src=home
System Specifications 4-bay storage for 3.5-inch SATA HDDs, 1.66GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM (Sodimm), 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports, 3x USB2 ports
Price £490 including VAT
HARDWARE OUTFIT Netgear continues to expand its line-up of Readynas home and small business NAS devices following its acquisition of original equipment manufacturer Infrant a few years ago. This latest model is essentially a tweaked version of the Readynas NVX launched last year, but while that was aimed at business users, the Ultra has a more consumer bent.
The Readynas Ultra 4 is more or less externally identical to the NVX, which is to say it's a solidly made and smart-looking metal box, this time finished in gunmetal grey. It's also remarkably compact considering there's room inside for four 3.5-inch SATA drives - about as big as a stack of 15 DVD movie cases - although the sturdy metal handle at the rear is a welcome touch given the weight of a fully loaded unit. The noise generated by the built-in fan can be distracting, though.
Three USB 2.0 ports support external storage devices or printers for sharing on a network, but the two Ethernet ports lack the load-balancing and failover functions found on the Readynas NVX. The Ultra also lacks the NVX's support for Windows Active Directory and a few other business-oriented features, but few consumer users will miss these. Otherwise, the Ultra and NVX offer essentially the same kind of network functionality; see the NVX review on The INQUIRER's sister site V3.co.uk for more details on this.
As with the NVX, the Ultra offers the usual array of RAID options to suit the number of installed drives, but the proprietary X-RAID2 offers more flexibility. This creates an automatic mirror when a second drive is installed and switches to RAID 5 with a third - all without taking the array offline. Add a fourth drive and the array is expanded, then you can switch out each drive in turn to expand the array still further, all without any downtime. This effectively makes the Readynas Ultra capable of growing alongside your storage needs, upgrading drives as capacities increase and prices drop.
A snappier response in the web admin panel and when browsing shares are mere fringe benefits though, and it is the performance when multitasking that benefits most; streaming media while running multiple add-ons, for example. There are a wide range of add-ons to choose from including a Bittorrent client and Itunes server, and the performance boost is welcome since running these concurrently tended to bring earlier Readynas devices to their knees. Sadly, the Ultra's Tivo Series 2 connectivity is neither here nor there since this PVR isn't available in the UK.
Much more useful are the Skifta and Orb add-ons that are available for this and other Intel-powered Readynas devices. Skifta essentially provides a DLNA connection over the Internet, although its inability to steam directly to a DLNA device limits its appeal - it needs a Mac or PC at the remote location to act as an intermediate server. Orb, on the other hand, does not and can stream directly to a remote laptop, Iphone or Android smartphone over a wireless connection. Video quality obviously depends on the bandwidth and Orb will transcode video on-the-fly to suit, but it worked extremely well with an Iphone 3GS in our tests, with minimal pre-play lag and smooth streaming.
In Short
Although any NAS can handle general multimedia file serving for consumer use, the flexibility offered by the Readynas Ultra's nippy processor, flexible X-RAID2 technology and wide choice of add-ons make it more capable than most and a better choice than the NVX for non-business environments. µ
The Good
Intel Atom 64-bit instruction set theoretically supports up to 16TB capacities, flexible upgrade path with X-RAID2, speedy performer with excellent multimedia support.
The Bad
Fan noise is distracting for a home environment.
The Ugly
Pricey for a barebones unit.
Bartender's Score
8/10
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A good name. However! I would see myself as halfway between HO and Joe linuxgod. I would see better value in a cheap athlonx2 PC running either windows or Ubuntu. It would offer much better CPU power and a lower price, really just missing out on lower power and neatness factor. Changing a fan may be easy but invalidates the warranty. Me and Harry are thinking of getting something that acts as a mediaplayer + NAS
So if it's the noise that stops you why not simply add another tenner to replace the fan? Seems a silly reason to pass it over if the rest sits right with you.
I mean I can get some people not being into tweaking and hardware and what not, but replacing a fan is something anybody should be able to do who isn't officially functionally retarded.
"The Good
Intel Atom 64-bit instruction set theoretically supports up to 16TB capacities, flexible upgrade path with X-RAID2, speedy performer with excellent multimedia support."
100% Marketing Bullshit.
Even a prehistoric 8-bit dinosaur like the 8080 could address 16 TiB of data on a disk, and much more.
"I also don't know what's so clueless about using Windows for your NAS, given that it's what almost everyone uses, what everyone knows, isn't supported by a community of all-knowing assholes, and in addition can be installed with little in the way of specialist knowledge straight onto an old car boot sale PC."
Just because everyone else does it isn't always a good enough reason for everyone.
The last few version of Ubuntu and now easier and faster to install than Windows Vista or 7.
Then there is also the stability problems that come along with a Windows OS. Some people are ok with it, but other people like me are not.
The Thecus is a different class of product, in that it is pitched as an SME solution whereas the Netgear is an unashamedly home market variant of same.
In your efforts to impart yet more of your godlike Linux knowledge I believe you have become confused about the comparative needs of home and of business users, and how each has their own sense of value. The media shifting features and crippled version of Memeo on the Netgear won't be of interest to any SME, and virtually no home user is going to want the choice of RAID levels or file systems offered by the Thecus when XFS will do them just fine. In addition, the battery backup on the N4200 is an irrelevance given that in any business environment the unit will be on the far side of a UPS.
I also don't know what's so clueless about using Windows for your NAS, given that it's what almost everyone uses, what everyone knows, isn't supported by a community of all-knowing assholes, and in addition can be installed with little in the way of specialist knowledge straight onto an old car boot sale PC.
@Hieronymus: You could do the same, with more performance for about half the cost, or less. Probably around £250 with ECC memory to boot.
FreeNAS is a joke, anything based on the FreeBSD kernel is going to have absurdly specific hardware requirements. You should be using a Linux based system, like CentOS, or Ubuntu. I suppose though if you're considering using Vista SP1 to run a NAS you wouldn't know the difference there in the first place.
If you're the kind of user that doesn't know what to do when a drive goes down, you probably shouldn't be using this device either. You'll be just as clueless either way.
Now the Thecus N4200, that deadly mentioned, that's a worthy product, as it actually has a battery backup, and other features that you should be going for. It even supports XFS/ZFS and raid volume encryption. It's a whole different class of product.
I seriously thought about one of these and waited for reviews to appear before I made up my mind.
A couple of things put me off like the noise. Every review mentioned that and being mines not postioned far from me It was a factor for me to consider.
I ended up buying a Thecus N4200 Which was almost the same price as the Ultra4 but with dual core and it was quiet!
Am very pleased with my purchase...
Did you read the article, joe? This is a LOT more than just mdraid and some Netgear hacked shell scripts. Once you've added the cost of the chassis, dual GB board, processor, RAM, power supply and so on, then factored in the time wasted configuring FreeNAS (which even now remains real picky about hardware combinations, and like most platforms of a *nix persuasion requires arcane knowledge together with hours spent in front of wiki pages and forum threads looking for the right sequence of weird looking incantations), then crowbarred in Orb or an equivalent, and finally duplicated all the other consumer oriented tricks the Netgear box does (FTP/s, quotas and so on), only to discover it doesn't work or, worse, that you have no idea what to do when a drive goes down, then £490 suddenly looks pretty fucking cheap.
Incidentally, I have also read various "build your own really fast NAS" articles on the likes of smallnetbuilder.com and you definitely need to crank your wallet wide to do that. The last one I read used Vista SP1 and at the time the licence for that alone was one quarter the cost of this Netgear. I know where my money would go.
I dunno, it just seems to me that this is nothing more than a small, but greatly overpriced linux server. It's probably just using mdraid and a bit of scripting to handle the drive additions, etc. I guess if people have money to throw at things, whatever. Seems a horrible waste of £490 though.
Here, I'll show you how to add a 4th drive to a 3 drive raid array, in 2 lines! Substitute /dev/sdb3 for whatever drive it is you're adding:
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb3
mdadm --grow --raid-devices=4 /dev/md1
£490 my ass...