wishlist - ultra 2/4/6 with sandybridge and hdmi

TeknoJnky wrote:
I want an ultra with an intel sandy bridge system and hdmi out.

I agree this would be great and coincidentally made the same suggestion back in October. It would be such an improvement to have the Intel QuickSync hardware accelerated transcoding and also let's face it the Atom processors are pretty anemic (as anyone who has used a netbook can attest to). A bottom of the range Sandy Bridge would not consume significantly more power on average than an Atom but it would make the whole ReadyNAS platform capable of so much more. Of course, the purchase price would be higher but within reasonable limits it could be justified if it saves buying a separate streaming device. Tomshardware showed that even a Core2 has better performance per watt than an Atom. Another possibility might be to build it around AMD's new Brazos platform which is slightly faster than an Atom but has much better graphics capabilities. I guess they could call it a ReadyMedia or something. I would wager that for most home ReadyNAS users the majority of the disk space on their NAS is consumed by Media files. It makes perfect sense to add an HDMI output to the device rather than needing two separate devices (NAS plus Streaming box) to be switched on.

Here's another idea: I'd like a ReadyNAS that can achieve >100 MB/s read and write speeds under all circumstances (i.e. even for doing a Windows directory copy that contains lots of smaller files). The Ultra 4 can only manage about 14 MB/s which doesn't come close to saturating a single gigabit ethernet connection. Perhaps Netgear could put an optional (Sandforce controller based) SSD cache into their products to accelerate beyond the limits that can be achieved with 4 mechanical disks, or even better provide an additional 6gbps SATA slot where customers can optionally install the SSD of their choice. With this sort of solution and dual-gigabit ethernet we could even exceed 200MB/s for a cost of an additional $150 for the SSD. There would also of course need to be some additional smartness built into the caching implementation so that the contents of cache does not get flushed when the nightly rsync backup reads the contents of the RAID volume. Perhaps this could be done my providing an additional read-only mount point (for use by non network based services like rsync or media indexing processes etc) that bypasses the SSD cache driver.