Netgear ReadyNAS RR2312
Huge storage density at a great price – but if you want 10GbE speeds, you’ll have to look elsewhere
SCORE PRICE Diskless, £1,198 exc VAT from ebuyer.com
If you’re hungry for storage, but short on rack space, Netgear’s ReadyNAS RR2312 could be the answer to your prayers. It’s the most capacious 1U rack NAS we’ve seen, cramming no fewer than 12 LFF hard disks into its compact chassis. This is no mean feat: it’s achieved by squeezing a micro-ATX motherboard into the back, leaving space up front for three banks of four SATA drives.
While this is a clever bit of engineering, it does mean the RR2312 is unusually deep at 934mm. After installing it in our 42U 1,000mm rack cabinet, we found we weren’t quite able to close the rear door, owing to the power cable sticking out the back. Luckily we had a shorter L-shaped power connector to hand, or we’d have had a problem – it’s that tight.
On the upside, drives are a doddle to fit: you just slide off the top cover, drop each disk into a bay and push it onto the combined SATA/power connector until it locks into place. We used a quartet of 8TB Seagate NAS drives, but the RR2312 is certified for use with Seagate’s 12TB IronWolf NAS drives, so you can pack in a massive 144TB of raw storage.
The appliance is built around a quad-core 2.1GHz Atom C3538 CPU, partnered by 2GB of DDR4 memory. At the rear, there are four Gigabit Ethernet ports plus two USB 3 connectors – but the motherboard doesn’t have a PCI-Express slot, so 10-Gigabit upgrades are off the table.
Configuring our storage was as easy as you could ask for. The free RAIDar app discovered the appliance, loaded the ReadyOS software and ran through a brief setup wizard. We opted for a single X-RAID2 array, allowing capacity to be quickly expanded by adding more drives; if you want traditional RAID arrays and multiple volumes, you can set that up using the Flex-RAID option.
Besides multi-disk redundancy, Netgear’s ReadyOS platform also offers a variety of built-in dataprotection features, including Btrfs copy-on-write protection, unlimited snapshots, cloud backup and on-appliance virus scanning. These are all pretty simple to use: to enable copy-on-write, you just have to tick the “bit-rot protection” option during NAS share and iSCSI LUN creation. Ticking the continuous protection box lets you schedule regular hourly, daily or weekly snapshots, and should you need to recover files, folders and LUNs, it’s easily done from the web
“If you’re looking for a lot of storage in a small enclosure, you won’t do better than the Netgear ReadyNAS RR2312”
console, where snapshots can be mounted as network shares for simple drag-and-drop file restores.
As well as the regular management interface, you can also take advantage of Netgear’s ReadyCloud portal, which lets you access and manage the device from anywhere on the internet. Individual users can be set up to remotely view, add or delete files and folders from the portal.
Cloud syncing is another strength: the latest version of Netgear’s ReadyOS supports Azure, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Amazon Drive, Wasabi, Google Drive and Dropbox. Netgear also offers its own Vault cloud backup service, with a business subscription costing around £30 per month for 2TB of storage.
NAS performance is good by Gigabit Ethernet standards. Accessing our share from a Windows server, we saw sequential Iometer read and write speeds of 113MB/sec and 110MB/sec. Drag-and-drop copies of a 25GB test file averaged 112MB/sec (read) and 109MB/sec (write), while our backup test using a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files was completed at a very creditable 87MB/sec.
To test maximum throughput, we connected to our share from four separate Windows systems, on dedicated Ethernet connections, and ran Iometer on all four systems at the same time. This yielded impressive cumulative read and write speeds of 452MB/sec and 397MB/sec, indicating there’s plenty of headroom here to serve a small business.
If you’re looking for a lot of storage in a small enclosure, you won’t do better than the ReadyNAS RR2312. A 10GbE option would have made it slightly more future-proof, but even without that it’s a slick, great-value appliance.
SPECIFICATIONS 1U rackmount chassis 2.1GHz Intel Atom C3538 2GB DDR4 12 x LFF hot-swap SATA drive bays supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, XRAID-2, hot-spare, JBOD 4 x Gigabit Ethernet, 2 x USB 3 fixed 350W PSU 5yr NBD hardware warranty