While the other three NAS units here are suitable for average consumers, Infrant’s ReadyNAS X6 is a product designed for geeks.

Resembling a home-brew mini PC more than a mass-produced NAS box, the ReadyNAS X6 gives you more flexibility than the other three units tested here. The cabinet supports up to four SATA drives and can actually be purchased bare-bones.
In the BYO drive config, the cost is $600. Equipped with 1TB of storage, the price hits $1,300, and for 1.6TB, you’ll shell out about $1,900. We reviewed the 1TB version with four RAID Edition WD drives running RAID 5. If one drive pukes, you can replace it with another and keep going. The ReadyNAS X6 will take a few hours to rebuild the array, but you can continue to use to access the data.

The unit supports a wealth of remote access protocols including FTP and HTTP, and you can even run a Squeezebox streaming-music box off of the ReadyNAS X6. If you run the ReadyNAS X6 on a UPS, the unit is capable of shutting down and emailing you when the battery is out or a drive is failing.

In our file-copy test, the ReadyNAS X6 easily outran the Maxtor and WD devices, but was slightly edged by the Linksys EFG250. Why? The ReadyNAS X6 uses a journaling file system to make recovery of data faster at the cost of disk performance. While the ReadyNAS X6 and our host PC support jumbo frames, our D-Link Gigabit switch did not. With a more robust switch, we suspect we’d see better performance from the X6.

Our main complaint is with a lack of drive drawers that would make a drive swap easier. We also would like more meaningful status lights instead of the Captain Pike variety. That’s not a lot to bitch about. The bare-bones ReadyNAS X6 with a single 250GB SATA drive puts you in the neighborhood of the Linksys EFG250. But the ReadyNAS X6 gives you far more features and expandability.


--Gordon Ung

Month Reviewed: November 2005


+ BONANZA Suprisingly quiet, robust controls, and flexible drive support.


- TONY DANZA Removing drives is a bitch, and it lacks hot-swappping capability.


Verdict: 9


kickass=yes
URL: www.infrant.com

BENCHMARKS

How we tested: We hooked up all four NAS units to a D-Link Gigabit switch and copied 3GB of data files from a 3.8GHz P4 570 machine equipped with Gigabit Ethernet. We also mounted each NAS unit as a network drive and ran SiSoft Sandra 2005's hard drive benchmark across the network.