I am considering upgrading my ReadyNAS Duo to an Ultra 2 Plus. The primary reason for upgrading is that I frequently copy (very large) files to/from my NAS and my USB 3.0 hard drive. As we all know, the Duo's USB performance with an NTFS formatted drive is extremely poor (I have tested it at 7MB/sec read, 4MB/sec write) and EXT3 is better (12MB/sec read, 10MB/sec write), but I use Windows and don't want to jump through hoops to use EXT3 on my USB hard drive (losing the performance advantage of using a USB 3.0 drive in Windows).
Anyway, I have not been able to find benchmarks for what the Ultra 2 Plus can do with NTFS formatted USB hard drives. I am looking for significant improvement over my Duo's performance, and hoping that the USB 3.0 port is put to good use (otherwise, I'd rather get an Ultra 4 Plus - assuming its USB NTFS performance is decent, even if not enough to saturate a USB 2.0 port).
Thank you for the response, mjw. That's very disappointing. I guess a ReadyNAS is no longer on my short list.
Netgear, if you are reading this, please consider moving to the Paragon NTFS driver and adding eSATA ports in your future ReadyNAS products. Thank you.
I found a faster way to back up my NV+ to a USB drive and that was to connect the USB drive to my PC and use copy/paste to back it up. I would start the backup and go to bed. That worked for me when I had about 60GB of data, but I then moved to eSATA connected drive, and then to backing up via rsync and now back up 1.8TB every night in just a few minutes. If you are considering a new unit, keep the Duo and use it for a back up target when backing up the new unit. No USB connection even USB3 can compete with the speed of rsync in backups between ReadyNAS units. (All ReadyNAS units support rsync, but not all competing units do).
Thanks for the tip, PapaBear. I have used that method before instead of using just the ReadyNAS and drive together, but I would like for my (next) NAS to be standalone and speedy in all of my usage scenarios.
My next NAS will not be a ReadyNAS, but I am giving my Duo to a family member who wants to share two printers and have a place to back up files from numerous laptops. For that purpose, the Duo will do very nicely.
