Netgear's ReadyNAS lineup is well respected in the sub-$5K SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market. In November 2010, Netgear updated their Ultra lineup meant for the high-end prosumer / SOHO market. In the economical prosumer market, Netgear's last introduction was the ReadyNAS NV+ and ReadyNAS Duo in June 2008. Today, Netgear is launching the update to their economical prosumer lineup with the 2-bay ReadyNAS Duo v2 and 4-bay ReadyNAS NV+ v2.

The products being introduced today are the first Marvell based units from Netgear. We were given early access to the 2 TB version of the ReadyNAS NV+ v2. Read on for our review.

The rise of powerful home networking solutions have led to the shift in consumer focus from DAS (Direct Attached Storage) units to NAS (Network Attached Storage) units in the home space. Storage solution vendors such as Western Digital and Seagate were quick to identify the needs of the consumers. We have NAS solutions ranging from simple network attached hard disks to multi-bay SMB / SOHO NAS units from both of them.

Today, we will take a look at the recently introduced My Book Live from Western Digital. It is not advertised as a full blown 1-bay NAS solution, but more as a network attached hard disk. Western Digital stresses the personal cloud nature of the unit (after all, cloud is the hot keyword right now!) and provides smartphone apps to enhance this experience. Read on to find out how the My Book Live performs.

The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) and Corporate NAS market is a highly competitive one. Over the last one year, we have been expanding our coverage of this market. Having reviewed a high end 5-bay unit from LaCie and a couple of 2-bay units from Synology and LG, it is now time to take a look at a unit from QNAP.

We have been playing around with the QNAP TS-659 Pro II unit over the last month or so. Based on the Intel Atom D525 platform, it has 6 bays and dual GbE ports, making it a candidate for the high end SMB market. Read on to find out more about the TS-659 Pro II and how it fares in our benchmarks.

The consumer Network Attached Storage (NAS) market has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. As connected homes become more ubiquitous, the need for centralised storage has become very important. On one hand, we have full blown NAS appliances like the ones from Synology and QNAP. They are aimed at the SMB market, but also serve home consumers well. On the other hand, we have appliances targeted specifically towards home consumers. D-Link and Netgear are some of the more famous companies catering to this market.

Today, we have a review of the LG's N2A2 NAS. The NAS comes with a GbE connection and two 1 TB SATA drives inside. Read on to find out how the NAS appliance performs.

The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) NAS market is a highly competitive one. A lot of things have changed since the last time we covered this market in a roundup. With storage becoming cheaper by the day, and HD videos (both user generated and commercial content) becoming more and more popular, it is difficult to find a SMB NAS which doesn't cater to the home consumer also. In 2006 (when we did our SMB NAS roundup), Synology was not one of the major players. In the last 4 years, though, they have taken giant strides and earned many plaudits.

We have had the latest 2 bay model from Synology, the DS-211+, in our labs since CES. Read on to find out how it fares in our benchmarks and see if it is a good fit for your usage scenario.

Back in March 2010, Intel announced an Atom based platform optimized for storage applications. Using either a D410 or the dual core D510, paired with an Intel 82801IR I/O controller, it was touted by Intel to have been picked up by various NAS vendors such as LaCie, LG, QNAP, Synology and Thecus. We have had the LaCie 5big storage server in our labs for the last few weeks. Aimed at the needs of small businesses, the server brings in a wealth of features thanks to the Windows Storage Server 2008 platform on which the NAS runs.

Read on for our review of the LaCie 5big storage server, and to identify whether it would be a good solution for the storage needs of your small business.

If you’ve got more than one PC in the home, having a network drive to share files, stream media and create backups can make a lot of sense. Seagate released the GoFlex Home series of NAS drives a couple of months ago, aimed at those of us who need copious amounts of storage, easy setup with simple user access and control features.  We were sent the the 2TB GoFlex Home, and have had it on a network for a couple of weeks now, finding that there’s plenty to like and also a few things that could be improved...

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If you are in the IT field, you have no doubt heard a lot of great things about ZFS, the file system originally introduced by Sun in 2004.  After doing quite a bit of research we decided to embark on a build of a ZFS storage platform that we could use to replace our existing SAN infrastructure at our hosting company.  We will go in depth talking about how ZFS works, what components we chose for our build, and the performance that we were able to achieve compared to our legacy Promise iSCSI SAN.  Read on to find out more about what we encountered and what we ended up with.