Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6

Testing of Netgear's ReadyNAS Ultra 6 was initially not promising, but once I got its firmware upgraded this NAS displayed its true colors. It turns out to be an excellent performer with abundant features suitable for small-to-mid-sized businesses, and it recovers from disk failure like a champ. Capable of holding a whopping 12TB of storage, the street price of $1349 with 6TB, and $899 for diskless, is worth every penny for any individual or business that values their data. Despite my initial troubles and a few oddities in the interface, the ReadyNAS Ultra 6 is clearly a contender for Editors' Choice. The ReadyNAS has 6 drive bays, each of which can hold a 3.5" SATA drive (it can handle up to 2TB per slot). The 1.6GHz Intel Atom dual-core processor gives speedy performance and the ReadyNAS has a 1GB DDR2 chip. The stand-out feature of the design is a well-designed LCD that displays status and networking information. For connectivity, the NAS has Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, one USB 2.0 port on the front for backing up to an external device, and two additional USB 2.0 ports on the back. The NAS I tested was configured with RAID level-X RAID 2 for redundancy. Basically, this acts as RAID 1, offering disk mirroring.