Netgear ReadyNAS RN3138 Review: Great NAS For Small Businesses
Introduction
The RN3138 is a 4-bay 1U rack mount enterprise NAS with a maximum capacity of 32TB for up to four hard disks (8TB each). The RN3138 replaces the RN3130 with a faster CPU and double the RAM of the RN3130. Netgear's RN3138 is powered by the Intel Atom C2558 Quad-Core 2.4GHz processor with 4GB of ECC DDR3 RAM. It supports a maximum memory of 16GB with both memory slots loaded. With that being said, I’ve been testing the RN3138 for a few days now and so far I've been impressed with the performance and features of the product.
The specification for the RN3138 suggests a maximum of 150 users which is what could be called a small to medium sized organization. The diskless version of the RN3138 sells for around a thousand dollars but there’s the 8TB, 12TB and 16TB that sell for $1,800, $2,570 and $2,885 respectively.
| Netgear ReadyNas Lineup | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Model: | RN2120 | RN3130 | RN3138 | CPU: | Marvell Armada XP Dual Core 1.6GHz | Intel Atom C2338 Dual Core 1.7GHz | Intel Atom C2558 Quad Core 2.4GHz | Memory: | 2GB | 2GB ECC UDIMM | 4GB ECC UDIMM |
| Drive Bays: | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Hot Swappable Drives: | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Max Capacity: | 32TB | 32TB | 32TB |
| eSATA: | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Gigabit LAN Ports: | 2 | 4 | 4 |
| USB Ports: | 1 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0 | 1 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0 | 1 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0 |
| Dimensions (D x W x H): | 14.4 x 19.1 x 1.7 in | 16.0 x 19.1 x 1.7 in | 16.0 x 19.1 x 1.7 in |
| Weight: | 9.3 lbs | 11.5 lbs | 11.5 lbs |
ReadyNAS OS is the software that drives the Netgear ReadyNAS devices and the latest version is 6.4.1. ReadyNAS software provides a nice clean interface that's easy to navigate and very user friendly. The RN3138 has a few unique storage features. It comes with unlimited snapshots so you can restore any previous version of a file. ReadyNAS Encryption also gives you real-time protection and encryption of files as they’re written.
The dimensions for the RN3138 come in at 486mm in length, 406mm width, 44mm height and weighs about 5.2kgs (not including HDDs). The RN3138 uses internal 1U server PSU which is not user replaceable and there is also no expansion chassis so you cannot add more than four disks and it doesn’t support the EDA500 5-bay desktop units either.
There are total of four 1Gb Ethernet ports and all support WOL. You can also use SSDs since it supports 2.5-inch drives. On the back of the RN3138, you will see three internal 40mm fans which run very quietly, two USB 3 ports, two eSATA ports and four gigabit Ethernet ports. On the front, you have one USB 2.0 drive, reset and power button. Under load, the RN3138 stays relatively quiet and cool.
I will be using two 1TB WD Green HDDs to test the performance of the RN3138. By default, the RN3138 will choose the X-RAID2 storage setup which is the same as raid-5 but uses Netgear’s proprietary scripts to automate expansion processes. X-RAID is an auto-expandable RAID technology that is available only on ReadyNAS systems and allows you to add storage space without reformatting your drives or moving your data to another location.
So I tested the performance by drag and dropping a 30GB file over Gigabit and I got 154MB/sec for read and 147MB/sec for write. I then copied a 60GB folder to a shared folder. This is my music collection folder with over 3,000 songs and it averaged around 129MB/sec.
I’m very impressed by the performance of the ReadyNAS 3138. The ReadyNAS OS has very good features and is easy to use, it offers good performance and it's relatively affordable too. What I don’t like is that the RN3138 has no expansion support and I also noticed that when you enable the anti-virus, the backup performance takes a hit and the read and write speeds got cut in half. Overall, I would recommend the RN3138 to anyone who’s looking for a high quality NAS with a ton of great features.