It has been a while since I've gotten a new NAS system, and I am totally impressed with this unit. It has been almost totally painless. Now all the computers at my house can have plenty of backup storage, and easily share all the data, video, photo, and music files you are likely to have.MY ENVIRONMENT
I am a Computer Engineer been in the field for 35 years, so I'm fussy about my hardware. I have a house hardwired with CAT5 plus a WiFi router. The main machines are Macs, but there are some Windows computers too. This unit supports Time Machine and the support works perfectly and painlessly. I also have a couple of DLNA media devices, so that is an important feature. The ReadyNAS also lets you plugin USB drives and they instantly become available on the network as well so all my old external USB drives are not useless with this upgrade.
THE GOOD (Great, actually)
* This device is as close to plug and play as I've seen in a long time. There is a somewhat lengthy setup but we're dealing with Terabytes of disk space that has to get organized and set up properly for the X-RAID striping.
* You can plug in new drives to expand capacity as needed.
* Works seamlessly on a mixed Mac/Windows/DLNA media environment
* Redundant storage keeps going even after a single disk failure. I feel all my photos and videos are now safe (although I still keep an extra off-site backup, just in case.)
* Fast almost as fast as a directly connected USB, but now available to all the computers in the house.
* Can install extra software to securely access your data from the web anywhere.
THE LESS THAN GOOD
* There is a setting on the Network Interfaces called MTU. The default setting didn't work quite right for Macs changing it to 1492 fixed things. But a call to NETGEAR's support actually solved the issue, so I'd rate their support very good.
* Not cheap but I've spent years generating all my video, photos, and music and I think the easy interface to this all is worth the price.
* The concept of 'Shares' is not really explained as well as I would have liked.
WHICH UNIT TO GET?
I decided I would spend a bit more for this unit it is the latest technology over the older NETGEAR units. I decided the 4 disk unit and single core unit would probably have the best cost/benefit ration. With this unit, using Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS (they seem to work flawlessly so far even though the aren't yet on the compatibility list for this unit), you can get up to 6TB of redundant storage (recovers from a single drive failure). I'd guess they will eventually support 3 to 4 TB drives.
In general avoid power-saving, "green" drives. There have been a lot of issues and power-savings translates into slowdowns managed by the drive's internals. Similar to how CPUs lower power consumption and heat by slowing down. If you want speed, green is not a "go".
I bought 2 x 2tb 64mb cache drives. I have a third, same spec at home, which I need to migrate data off first.
I plugged the Netgear into the Verizon FIOS wireless router(six 100Mb LAN ports) and my laptop was plugged into this. I transferred 500 Gb of data to the netgear and it sustained just about 80 mbps network transfer rate across the network. That's about what you can hope for on 100MB. Depending upon switch & pc hardware and transfer protocol I have seen higher, but often highspeed transfers max out at the 80% mark. Once I bring a gig switch to the house I'll see if I can push further. At some point I will max out read or write. Just not sure when and whose limits.
The Apple streaming support is there. I-Tunes found my 20,000 song library on the netgears. My shares automatically showed up on Macs. Windows mapped without issues. None of the playlists work anymore though. And information is missing or wrong. DLNA worked, but I don't have a good DLNA client. I think my blueray player may have some capability there. I'll update once I get it wired up to the network. I don't have a TIVO to test out Tivo support as well.
Unlike complaints of the lower end model, the admin interface on the Ultra is quick and responsive. I showed the unit to an earlier model ReadyNAS owner and they see a big difference. I'll be buying a second one to have them sync and backup eachother across the internet later this month.
A week after I got the unit NetGear emailed me that a new code is available. The update was easy and worked as expected. The ReadyNas sends me alerts via email for changes and problems.
Completely happy with the purchase. More money than many would spend on the shell, but in minutes I had services running without knowing Linux or compiling or installing or anything. By the time I buy the hardware and spent the time building researching, trying different software... this saved tremendous time.
2013 Update
I now own two of these units. My two regrets are that sometimes I wish I had bought the 6-bay unit as I have extra 2TB drives I could be using. My second regret was that when running plex transcode definitely taxed the CPU. I thought ultra was the best CPU in the line, but I read something that there was a box with a beefier CPU. However, I doubt whether any NAS-cpu would be beefy enough to handles big transcodes.
My setup is that I have one NAS and one backup NAS. Each night the NAS runs RSYNC-based backups of the files to the BACKUP unit. When I travelled around the country, my NAS came with me and my full backup was safe at home.
Using a GIG network I was able to push over 500 mbps to the NAS (4 drives). This translated to 70-75 Megabytes of file data per second. Pulling files was higher. The speed is absolutely dependent upon your choice of drives. Cheap, mismatched drives may perform to the slowness of the least performer.
I added the Netgear Remote to the backup so I could VPN in and access shares on a mac or windows. But I found large files were prone to failure. I turned up the FTP server on the unit and use that for resumable FTP downloads of large files. Also, on the Mac the Remote (VPN) client only works if you install tuntap. The only way you find that out it from a forum post buried in antiquity. The Mac client hasn't been updated in ... years.
I have added and swapped drives repeatedly. At first adding 2TB (4x2TB) drives, then replacing two with 3TB (2x2TB,2x3TB), then replaced the 3Tb with 4 TB(2x2TB,2x4TB). Adding/replacing drives is easy. The resync of the volumes always takes the longest. I think my longest time was about 14-18 hours. When expanding with new space you will be told in the logs to reboot the unit to take advantage of new space. I've found the disk maintenance to be pretty flawless, even though it is stressful due to risk. I've had the unit powered off by blackout during disk maintenance and when it powered up it picked up where it left off. I do FSC Checks and Parity scrubs once a week. The other night I was in a store and I got an email from the backup NAS. A disk has growing SMART errors. Hardware failure is likely. I love it.
A warning about bare disks. When you buy a bare disk, immediately go to the manufacturers website and validate the warranty. Website stores are selling OEM recovered disks. Vendors do not warranty these at all. The store that sold you it, is the only warranty. Don't get caught in these scams. I just checked all eight drives. And yes, the failing drive was an OEM bought from an Amazon Seller. I bought two identical drives from the same seller. One was an illegal OEM, the second had only a 1.5 year warranty--which means it was old and sold through some other shady means.
So, the Add-Ons were a draw, but I must say that some are half-hearted developments that were one-offs by someone years ago. There are a few good ones, but they didn't provide as much value as I had hoped. The good thing is there are still people out there bulding stuff so the platform is still active.
I turned up the I-Tunes streaming server, which is actually a FireFly server. However, Firefly development stopped in 2008. So while it works, and they've had to patch it to deal with breaks from I-Tunes development, I find it not fully functional. I can't get smartlists to function properly, and at last play with the configs--they vanished completely. It shows Ratings on songs--but they aren't my ratings. I have rated over 10,000 songs in my library and this is important to how I use I-tunes. Consequently, the i-Tunes streaming is a "look what it can do" rather than an actually USED feature.
I enabled SSH root access ad I've found that helpful with other projects, like setting the NAS as a syslog server for home to debug problems on other systems. It is also extremely fast to move files between shares at command line rather through a remote OS. Remote OSes pull the files off one share and transmit to the other. By doing it at command line, it is disk table change, size of the file is unimportant.
I added Plex to the NAS and that was a great addition. Plex is a media server that provides a content-rich front end with pictures and info about any movies or TV shows you've ripped from your DVDs. It also does transcodes, which means it will step the resolution of the video down to get it to lower bandwidth devices -such as when you are away from home or even viewing on an Android phone, itouch, iphone or ipad or android tablet. Outside of the tablets, watching tv on a phone is a moment of desperate boredom. (Note Android/iOS clients aren't free,$5, everything else IS free) Plex works very well on the ReadyNAS. However, transcodes require CPU and the performance fell apart on any substantial conversions. Eventually I moved Plex to a mini-pc (Dell Zino HD). Once I did that the stutters and stalls vanished. The ReadyNAS CPU isn't up to that kind of task. Now for local content Plex on the NAS can still do DirectPlay, which means it hands your device the original file. Each device must be capable of handling whatever format. For that functionality it worked perfectly. Plex on the NAS immediately became a real-use product. I even enabled internet access so I could watch my movies or TV shows when away from home.My initial installation went smooth, but then the unit got really slow and I was unable to use the NetGear RAIDar utility. After an endless email exchange with support, they asked me to call them for help. I did. Things went down hill from there.
NetGear's support is the worst I have ever encountered. I was willing to pay for support to resolve my issue. However, since I purchased this particular product and did not fully populate it with drives, the support team refused to assist me after spending almost 1 hour on the phone answering their ridiculous questions and being pitched to purchase longer support contracts.
The money is not the issue here. The refusal to help me is. I'm sure whatever my issue is can be resolved by a competent support person. And I was happy to pay for it. But after being passed around to multiple techs whose English was poor, phone connection faint, and I was put on hold for at least 50% of my conversation, they finally refused to help me.
I thought I bought a premium product. NetGear has my money and I have a dead end product. I RECOMMEND THAT YOU STEER CLEAR OF THIS PRODUCT AND NETGEAR.I've had the ReadyNAS Ultra 4 for over a year and it has operated flawlessly. Started w/ 2 drives and once they were full popped in a third unformatted disk and it was automatically formatted and data re-striped without incident. Last week my 3 drives reached capacity and I popped in a 4th which was automatically formatted and all 4 drives again re-striped without incident. With the current firmware, you can now plop 4 3TB drives in this box (12TB total raw capacity). With conventional mirroring, that would give you 6 TB of fully redundant capacity. With Netgear's XRAID striping technology you actually would get around 8.25TB of fully redundant capacity.
The NAS allows you to configure an email address and it will automatically send you an email when appropriate (e.g. h/w problem, reboot, firmware updates available, nearing full capacity, etc.). I have applied several firmware updates as they have come available and experienced no update issues.
Finally, the ReadyNAS forums are extremely helpful and full of very sharp people that have been very helpful in answering technical questions.I got RNDU4000 Ultra about 4 weeks ago, (Diskless) Loaded it with couple of Seagate 1TB each. The ReadyNAS did all the Formatting and initial volume configurations. It was effortless. I then installed the memeo backup apps and all our 5 pcs and 2 notebooks were configured for backups. I attached my UPS USB cable and the Ready NAS ultra saw it it. Once I setup all the media devices plus my Samsung 8000 3D LED 55", BD 6900 and few other DLNA devices we have, it was a ready go. Since I have a Central Panel for all our network stuff the little noise from it I only hear when I go there. So far it has been a wonderful and solid media NAS server.
I am currently looking into how to setup the orb capability.
Note: The Memeo say I have 30days, as such I don't know yet if they shipped the NAS with memo trial version, if so, that would suck.
A bit pricey at $600 (Diskless) In all, I would greatly recommend it.
-Dayo, Austin TX
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