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The appliance supports hardware managed RAID arrays and Netgear's X-RAID technology enables you to upgrade capacity by swapping out each drive in turn for larger ones. Installation is handled neatly by the bundled RAIDar utility and then you can move to the slick web interface which opens with a quick start wizard that takes you through setting up shares and workgroup or Windows domain membership. Clients support is tops as Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac systems can use the appliance and it offers FTP services on selected shares.

Netgear provides plenty of backup features with scheduled snapshots taking point in time copies of selected volumes. Standard backup jobs can also be scheduled where you select a source on the appliance and choose a destination which can be a local location, another ReadyNAS appliance or a remote network share. You can select a USB device as a destination and this brings the Backup button on the front panel into play. You assign the job to the button and pressing it automatically secures selected data on the appliance to a storage device plugged into the front USB port. There's more as Netgear includes a copy of Retrospect Express 7.5 which is an ideal candidate for automating regular workstation backup to the appliance.

At the time of review Netgear was working on the next big firmware release and allowed us a peek so we can bring you a first look as what to expect. Naturally, the web interface gets the Netgear treatment and its responsiveness has been speeded up. Underneath this the Linux kernel goes from v2.4 to v2.6 and it brings in a stack of new features including support for volumes of 2TB and greater, improved USB device support including the NTFS file format, advanced X-RAID expansion, network UPS support, NFS over TCP and much more.

During testing we noted that some performance issues have also been resolved as FTP speeds have always been cause for concern. Prior to upgrading we used the FileZilla utility to copy a 690MB video from the appliance to a Supermicro 3.2GHz Pentium D workstation and back again over Gigabit Ethernet and saw 9-10MB/sec for both read and write operations. With the appliance upgraded these speeds improved significantly to 18.2MB/sec and 12.8MB/sec respectively. CIFS file sharing doesn't get a boost with file copies returning a respectable 27.6MB/sec read and 15.3MB/sec write speeds on both firmware versions.

Verdict

The ReadyNAS NV+ remains one of the best desktop NAS appliances on the market as it offers a quality range of feature highly suited to personal and business use alike. It's competitively priced and our initial impressions of the next firmware release are very favourable as it promises plenty of valuable new features and a speed boost to FTP operations as well.

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