David Flynn03 February 2009, 2:00 PM
New ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer Edition will ship with six empty bays, allowing users to choose their own drives for up to 6TB of storage. Plus: get a free 1TB drive with any new ReadyNAS Duo or NV+.
Netgear is betting the boom in broadband, home networks, HD video and the ceaseless tsunami of torrents will stack up in favour of its ReadyNAS servers. After all, the benefits of a home server or NAS should be self-evident – now Netgear (like other spruikers of network storage) just needs people to buy the things.
To that end, the company is hitting high and low over the next few months. For ‘high’, read the tech-savvy enthusiasts (‘prosumers’, in marketeer-speak) who like the idea of a solid commercial-grade NAS but want to fit their own drives into the box.
The ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer Edition is just that – the company’s top shelf NAS box with six empty 3.5 inch SATA drive bays. It’s also the first ReadyNAS to be powered by an Intel processor, specifically a Core 2 Duo powerplant – previous models have used a bespoke ‘network storage processor’ designed by Infrant Technologies, which created the ReadyNAS product line and was acquired by Netgear in 2007.
The six-bay ReadyNAS Pro will soon ship in a driveless 'bare bones' config for around $2,500
Netgear claims the new dual-core Intel chip will give the NAS boxes significantly more headroom and muscle, sufficient for multiple HD video streams – the company claims it can “easily handle over 14 simultaneous 1080p HD streams”.
But even in its barebones state, there’s a bit of an ouch factor to the ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer – Netgear lists a rec retail price of $3,499. The street price is more pleasing, with techstore search engine StaticIce.com.au showing several vendors already discounting the as-yet-undelivered NAS (it’s due late March or early April) to around $2,500.
If your pockets aren’t quite that deep, or you want to set up a basic and relatively budget-priced NAS for your decidedly non-techie friends or family, the ReadyNAS Duo might appeal – especially this month, when Netgear launches a reseller promo which gives away a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive with each of the consumer-grade NAS boxes.
The entry-level ReadyNAS Duo, along with the four-bay ReadyNAS NV+, both come with a free 1TB Seagate drive as part of a current sales kickerThe two-bay ReadyNAS Duo ships in 500GB, 750GB and 1TB configurations listed at $950, $1,200 and $1,600 respectively, although street prices are about $500, $750 and $1,000 (yes, that’s about one dollar per gigabyte). Throughout February, Netgear will chuck in a 1T Seagate drive which can be fitted into the Duo’s second spare bay.
However, as the Duo is designed to support only RAID mirroring from the first drive to the second rather than expanding the total data pool, you’ll still only have as much storage space as came on the ReadyNAS Duo out of the box.
The same ‘free 1TB drive’ deal is also available for buyers of the more flexible ReadyNAS NV+, which will allow you to configure the drive to either mirror the date on your existing drives or add a terrific terrabyte to the NAS’s overall capacity.