Netgear ReadyNAS 3130 review

Installation got off to a good start as Netgear's ReadyCloud web portal discovered the appliance and offered to configure it for us. However, we came across an annoying glitch as the portal's last request before handing it over is for us to press the OK' or Backup' button.

Trouble is, the 3130 doesn't have these so the portal timed out waiting while we tried to find the buttons. The manual doesn't mention this so we asked Netgear which advised we should press the Reset button.

We dropped in four 4TB WD Red drives and let it create a single X-RAID2 array. These are the same as Synology's hybrid arrays which support a mix of different drive sizes and let you increase capacity by swapping out drives for larger ones in sequence.

A useful feature of the ReadyCloud portal is it allows registered appliances to be accessed remotely from anywhere. Users can also log in, view, add or delete files and folders and copy files directly from the desktop by dragging them into the Shares Browse page.

Netgear's ReadyOS admin interface is nicely designed and easy to use