Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus Review

There are a number of slick and interesting features buried within Netgear’s ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus. They include an easy-to-navigate setup screen, integrated backup utilities, a magician’s hat worth of streaming services, and ample settings for user permissions and management groups. But don’t let the good looks deceive you: Some of these features can be maddening to configure. The Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus runs a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and supports up to four drives in an X-RAID2 configuration. X-RAID2? That’s not a typo—X-RAID2 is Netgear’s proprietary technology that lets you add or remove drives from your array at will. With two drives, the X-RAID2 creates a mirror array. With three drives, your capacity doubles; with four, it triples. Whether you’re transferring single huge files (like movies) from this Gigabit-powered NAS device or from your desktop to the ReadyNAS, you’ll appreciate the system’s haste: We clocked sub-minute transfers in either direction for a single 2.79GB file. On our test that measures a device’s ability to process 176 files totaling 659MB, the ReadyNAS took between 11 and 14 seconds to complete the transfer.