Hands on: An alternative to Windows Home Server

Whereas on some appliances extra disks can be used to expand capacity, on the Readynas the second drive is used solely for backup. No special setup is needed; the X-Raid software on the box automatically mirrors the contents of the first to the second drive when its added.

Expansion is possible, but only by upgrading to larger disks or by plugging more external drives into the USB ports. Three USB connectors are available, two at the back and one at the front, and disks connected to any of these can be either shared or used to take backups of the appliance.

You can also plug in a USB memory key and configure the appliance to copy the contents into a time-stamped folder. That way it’s possible to upload photos, music and other files to the appliance without having to power up a PC first.

A Gigabit interface is provided for Lan connectivity while, on the software side, the Readynas Duo runs a Linux-derived OS called Raidiator which, as with virtually all Nas appliances, is managed via a web interface. Called Frontview, it’s not the fastest GUI I’ve used, but is easy to navigate and much simpler to understand than a full-blown server.

A wizard helps with initial setup, including adding the Readynas to a Windows workgroup. There are no facilities to authenticate users via Active Directory, but then most home networks are set up for workgroup authentication so it’s not a big deal. Creating shares and managing access rights is easy with a useful user-based quota option.

Windows file sharing is configured by default, along with support for Apple, NFS and web-based (HTTP/S) protocols. It’s also possible to plug in two USB printers and share them on the network, with everything managed via the web-based Frontview GUI.

The extras
To start with there’s a built-in backup tool, plus a scheduler which lets you take backups of your data to an external USB disk or other location, such as another appliance or an FTP or website. Netgear has also included utilities to stream music, photos and video directly from the Nas appliance to network-attac hed media players.

A number of these streaming servers are pre-installed to provide support for a variety of media players (a complete list can be found on the Readynas website), with very little setup work needed to get them to work. All are simple tickbox options on the Frontview GUI, including a Firefly iTunes server which I simply selected then managed via a separate web interface.