Netgear Ready Nas NV+ 4 Bay Gigabit Desktop Network Storage

I won't repeat much of what's already been said in the other reviews, but to summarise, I've been using the ReadyNAS for over a year now, so my review is based on proper hectic usage rather than out-of-the-box or 1 month usage.

Overall, i'm *very* impressed with its performance and ease of use. It's solid, sturdy (bit heavy but i like).. It's cheaper now (almost half price) compared to when I bought it, but I still find buying the bare-bone (RND4000) and HD's separately much cheaper. If cost still puts you off, I can assure from personal experience that it's definitely worth every penny. Back then I bought 4x1TB disks but for the same price you can get 4x2TB disks. There's a list of supported disks on their website, but I found Western Digital disks are very reliable and work like a charm. You may get occasional popups about error counts increasing, but it's perfectly normal, unless you're getting hundreds or thousands a day...

Raid X is truly amazing, fully redundant.

The main reason I like it and chose it is that it has proper support for Mac OSX, as well as Time Machine. I allocated 600GB on it for Time Machine backups, and backup my 2 MBPs through my Gigabit Ethernet with ease. In addition, you can setup shares with AFP (Apple's File Protocol) and NFS (for Mac and Linux). I found AFP to work beyond my expectations in terms of speed and reliability. I also enabled SMB file share for such apps like XBMC and visitors with Windows OS.

And for you tekky people out there, I moved my VMware images onto the box and run them from my Mac with ease, and minimal lag/latency.

The hard drives are quite cool, even though I have it constantly on, and constantly reading/writing to it. And the ReadyNAS widget for OSX along with automated emails keep me updated about temperature, fan speeds, array status, and any issues that may arise.

Its interface is a + in my eyes. Very easy to use, update, enable addons, etc. And for those brave enough, SSH is also useful and possible (it's running a linux Kernel).

The modules it has are also interesting. I finally can switch off my Macs and use the Torrent client within the ReadyNAS.

A year on, and the only disadvantages I saw that made me give this 4 stars instead of 5 are as follows.

* It comes with little RAM memory; I think 256MB RAM. Although it's good enough, but it'll take *forever* to sync arrays, repair, check health, etc.. I would highly recommend to purchase a 1GB stick of Kingston RAM, which is fairly cheap, and worth every penny. Replacing the RAM is very easy and there are tutorials on youtube on how to do it.

* Even though I've taken care to clean and de-dust it regularly, the fan inside starts to get noisy with time. Now, every 15 - 30 minutes, it emits a loud hoover-like noise for 2 - 3 minutes. Loud enough that I had to move it away from the living room. I haven't enquired to replacing the FAN, but I'm sure it's not too hard.

Overall, I can safely say that I'm happy enough to purchase a second one if I had to. Coming from a person who manages his own Linux server with 10+ disks, I would gladly sacrifice or make the server redundant later, while swapping it with a ReadyNAS or two.

* Much, much easier and ergonomic to manage the disks physically.
* Managing/repairing Raid arrays is a pain, and ReadyNAS just does it all for you. It hasn't let me down yet.
* No worry about updates, unlike my Linux server where every so-often an update breaks the system and I spend a day or 2 repairing it
* No worry about power cuts affecting my arrays, and spending a day or two figuring out which disk belongs to which array

* If it costs a bit more to make life easier when it comes to the above, I would gladly do it - and I did.

I hope this review helps anyone. Happy to comment more.

This is one of the best bits of kit I've ever bought. Setting up the NAS was simple and it's also my print server for my USB printer.

I was quite worried about how difficult this would be to set-up when I bought it but it turned out to be quite simple.

The set-up process is still full of terms and names a novice wouldn't understand but truthfully it was very simple... most of the default settings are what the average person will need.

Really switching it on and going through the manufacturer provided set-up (almost always accepting the defaults) will do.

I bought the 2x500Gb drive version and was happy to discover that it came with some of the most reliable and expensive disks in the supported disk list form the manufacturer (infrant technologies - look on infrant.com - netgear re-badge the unit).

Things to note:
* to get the most from this device it'd be best to use a 1Gbps network. I was planning to buy a new router which would interface my ADSL2+, offer a few 1Gbps Ethernet ports and pre-n wireless but consumer products to do this don't seam to exist, yet.
* My personal firewall - zone alarm didn't like the device (even with the controls on the local zone switched off. I've moved to a different personal firewall which works fine.

Ive got one of these babies with 4 x 1tb disks. I have to say was one of the best IT spends ive done for the home and i do a lot :P

Im a bit of a DVD/CD Gannet on Amazon, spend a large % of my income @amazon on movies and albums so a while back i built a Windows Media Center with Vista Ultimate for the lounge. Spent several months converting the lot to DivX/MP3 and I also added a Linksys DMA2200 Extender recently and a Linksys WRT600N Gigabit Lan/Wireless N Router (import from us cos not being released in UK according to Linksys).

Anyway, despite having 2tb of disk space in the media center, i bought this to give access to other pc's on my home network with low power consumption. Did a bit of research and stacked up the specs against each other and this came out top overall.

took the plunge, but bought the barebones version which was actually a ReadyNAS NV+ RND4250 but had disks removed. I opted to fill it with 4 x Samsung 1tb disks as its not worth shelling out the extra cash for the WD or Seagate jobbies as theres no performance advantage in a NAS (gb lan or wifi lan is bottleneck not seek times) and saved myself a few quid in the process.

Have to say its absolutely rockin. In X-Raid i get 2.7tb with full redundancy from 4x1tb disks. If any one of the disks goes down, just pop it out and replace and the X-Raid rebuilds the array with the replacement disk and with no data lost.

Built in Functionality is second to none, its got a dev site where u can add bittorrent and some other apps developed by community, well done Netgear for absorbing infrant into their product portfolio.. its the best product they have in their lineup! (im away from netgear wifi products and over to linksys cos of poor wifi performance and bugs).

Admin and setup is simple if ur experienced IT pro, then u will really like it, if ur not, it wipes it 4 u. Windows/unix/linux/mac clients are all catered for and all thru a web browser be it Firefox, Safari or the other one that most people use :S

Ive had no freezes, no crashes, no performance problems and no issues whatsoever, its been runnin with latest raidiator firmware for bout 2 months with no issues, just lovely.

It is accessed by a UNC share \\servername\sharename and can even be setup as a WINS Server ;)

Its got too many features to mention, but one great feature i like is the schedule that you can set for uptime/downtime so that its only on when u want it on. Good green credentials and its on when im around 2 use it with low consumption.

In terms of robustness, its built like a small Tiger Tank, very heavy, solid construction, with status panel and cool lights n no flimsy stuff u normally get with netgear home products like their routers.. it was built by somebody else before they got bought by Netgear ;) so no issues in this dept :D

Before u buy just look around and get ur own disks all of the same type.

Its a great product that has so much functionality and possibilities for further functionality expansion thru a community... best of breed IMHO

About 2 buy my 2nd unit, i luv it ;)

Enjoy ;)