As a member of the Data Generation, I’ve found that my photos, videos, and documents quickly expand to fill their containers. A standard USB drive is quickly replaced by another, larger one while home network file servers fall by the wayside as they get full, old, and dangerously lossy. In short, it’s time for the big guns.
That’s why I was pleased to try out the Netgear ReadyNAS 524X, part of Netgear’s new network attached storage series aimed at small businesses and home users. The diskless version costs about $800 and can hold up to 40TB.
This NAS is essentially a small computer. It can run apps including tools for BitTorrent downloads and remote backups and it uses XRAID to ensure hot-swapability on each drive. This feature, enabled by RAID6, allows for the catastrophic failure of up to two of the drives but causes a deep hit in storage capacity. This also means you can literally pull a disk out of this thing randomly and have the entire setup still run. If you want to know your real-world sizing with RAID6 enabled this calculator can help.[1] I tested the performance by pulling two disks and everything worked perfectly although the reindexing process lasted over 24 hours each time the device was hit.
Setting up the drive is quite simple. To add a drive you simply pull out a carriage and snap the drive into place without tools. When you boot up for the first time you can begin a formatting process that brings all the drives online simultaneously. Then, when you need to swap one out, you can shut down the system manually and replace the drive offline. All you have to do is connect an Ethernet cable – this doesn’t support...
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