Netgear ReadyNAS 3130 review

Netgear’s 1U rack NAS teams up some interesting backup features with a boost in performance

IT Pro Verdict

The improved hardware in the ReadyNAS 3130 makes it much faster than previous models. Netgear’s block-level snapshots offer good data protection features and it’s not short on cloud apps either

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Much improved performance; Unlimited snapshots; Integrated cloud backup and file syncing

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Still no expansion support; AV scanner hits backup performance

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A key feature of Netgear's ReadyOS software is its wholesale move from the EXT4 file system to BTRFS. The biggest bonus of this is support for unlimited block-level snapshots for both NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs.

You'll meet these when you create a share or LUN as they both have a continuous protection check box. Enabling this allowed us to choose hourly, daily or weekly snapshots and for shares, we could permit network access to snapshots or hide them.

File, folder or LUN recovery is just as simple as we viewed the Dashboard's timeline graph for the selected share or LUN, chose a snapshot and selected the rollback option. Snapshots can also be cloned and presented as a new share or LUN.

The ReadyCloud iOS app allowed us to remotely browse shares on the appliance and backup our photos to it

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Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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