SmallNetBuilder

Closing Thoughts

As I said at the top of the review, the NV is an evolutionary step in the ReadyNAS line, with its biggest benefit to home users being the attractive enclosure. But it's not like its good looks will earn it a spot as an media server in a living room setting, since it's still too noisy for that.

The benefits of the NV's hot-swappable drives and ability to use either manual RAID or Infrant's X-RAID will be more appreciated by small business and even corporate users, who also may be less inclined to balk at the NV's $60 - $100 price premium (for diskless models and depending on where you shop) over the ReadyNAS 600 or X6.

Although the ReadyNAS 600 seemed to do better than the NV in my throughput testing, I think the differences are better explained by differences in firmware version, processor used and possible difference in settings. Given that the network processor, memory configuration and firmware are now common across the 600, X6 and NV, I wouldn't choose one model over the other solely based on performance.

Update 13 March 2006: As noted earlier, the NV will provide better performance than a ReadyNAS 600 with equivalent System Performance settings.

The "pro-sumer" TeraByte RAID NAS market is still relatively uncrowded, and not for those on limited budgets. But if you're ready to step up to the world of higher-capacity, fault-tolerant storage, any of the ReadyNAS products are still what I'd recommend you put at the top of your shopping list.