Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 Home Storage Solution ( 2 Bay ) - No Drives Included

I see that people are still reading this review after a couple of years, and I appreciate all of the positive feedback, so only fair to keep it up to date.

I stick with most of what I say below, but will be switching to a Home Server running Windows Home Server 2011. The NAS is fine as a simple file server or backup device, but the technology is old and the laborious procedure for updating the Squeezebox software (main reason I originally bought the DUO) has become too much of a niggle, and my network has expanded. So it is time to move on, and I can no longer really recommend this NAS with complete conviction.

Original review:

Very important: Start with 1 disk only in the ReadyNas, and if you have 2 disks of different sizes that you intend to use, make sure you start with the SMALLEST one first!

Also: It really is very important to read the instructions!

This is an excellent little NAS device for the price, but does require a bit of prior knowledge to set up or research if you are not overly familiar with networking, and you should definitely take the time to read the manual on the installation disc. First you should be aware of the limitations. For this price you are not buying a high performance device, but if you are willing to spend a bit more you can upgrade the Duo to get a lot more from it. I'll come back to that later. You must also read the documentation to see what hard drives and what combination of drives are compatible. I've seen a couple of reviews here on Amazon with people complaining that this or that doesn't work. That's simply not true but you do need to perform some basic checks before you start spending money. I purchased the RND2000 which ships with no drives, but then purchased a couple of 500GB Seagate drives (serial ATA running at 7200 RPM). You could put an old drive in it but large new discs are fairly inexpensive these days, and they are making them much more energy efficient now too. You will have to completely format any old drive before beginning anyway as the file management software uses a proprietary Linux operating system.

Do visit the ReadyNAS website as it contains a lot of useful information. I bought this to have a backup solution, as well as the ability to share information between computers on my home network. I have not yet tried the internet file sharing facilities so cannot comment on those. I also wanted a music library for my Squeezebox that is accessible while my pc is switched off.

For backup you should be sure to install the NTI shadow software, which is excellent by the way, from the disc before you attempt to back up your files. You should also read the manual to learn how to set up folders in the ReadyNAS before you back anything up. NTI shadow is then a doddle to use, and once the initial backup is done it will do incremental backups so that only the files that are changed or added will be backed up. For the initial backup you need to give yourself some time to get it all done, and if you have a large amount of data this means some hours (you can of course leave it to get on with things while you wash your hair or watch the football).

The next thing is the Squeezebox set-up. I can't comment on the other add-ons such as iTunes and Bit Torrent as I don't use them, although I've read in many reviews that the Bit Torrent client works fine. First thing is that the version of Squeezecenter that comes embedded in the ReadyNAS Duo is a light version, and if you have a Squeezebox then almost inevitably you have already upgraded to the new and renamed Squeezebox Server. What this means is that if you backup your music files to the Duo and then access it from the Squeezebox, the firmware on the Squeezebox will update to the older version, and if you then switch back to the library on your PC it will have to undergo another update to the new firmware. This will happen each time you switch libraries so obviously it makes sense to upgrade the firmware on the Duo to be the same as on your PC. This is quite easy to do but you will have to follow the instructions carefully. There is a link in the Duo control panel under "Streaming Services" next to the Squeezebox settings which when clicked will take you through a step-by-step procedure to successfully upgrade. Once this is done the interface with the Squeezebox is seamless and it's wonderful to have your music available on demand. There is a downside though, which is that every time there is a new release of the Squeezebox Server and you decide to upgrade the version on your PC, you will have to completely remove the server software on the ReadyNAS and re-install the newer version after following a fairly lengthy procedure if you want both versions to be syncronised. It is also worth noting that the version releases for your PC and the ReadyNAS may not be at the same time so if you do intend to upgrade one, then it's wise to check if the other is available too.

Now a few words on beefing up the performance. You should be aware that the Duo ships with a category 5 LAN cable which is only capable of transferring data at a rate of 100Mbps, but the device itself is capable of 1Gbps. This means that if your router is capable of 1Gbps you should also purchase a Cat 5e or Cat 6 LAN cable to get the most out of it. You should also be aware that if you are accessing the Duo over a wireless connection the speed of data transfer will only be as high as your router and wireless card are capable of. It will be much faster if your main PC is attached to the router via a LAN cable (which should also be cat 5e or 6 to maximise speed), but if you go wireless then a wireless N setup will be faster than wireless G. The next thing you can do is replace the 256MB RAM with up to 1GB. You do need to take care that it is compatible. There is a compatibility list on the ReadyNAS webite (not to be confused with the Netgear website), but the module I used was purchased from Crucial Memory, the part number is CT12864X335 and it cost about £40. If you only wish to upgrade to 512MB then you will have to use the compatibility list to see what is best.

So in summary, this is a lovely little device that is easily upgradeable, but it's not plug and play and does require a small amount of confidence to set up, although very easy to do if you are willing to read the documentation properly. If you are also willing to spend a bit more you can turn the ReadyNAS Duo into quite an impressive NAS device for a reasonable cost. Did I also mention that it is tiny? About the size of two Wilbur Smith novels put together! It runs very quietly after a noisy start, and the power saving options work with no trouble. I think it is excellent but gave it 4 stars as you need to spend more to get the best from it and is not as simple to set up as some may like.

It is also a bit of a pain to keep the Squeezebox Server versions updated and in line with the version on your PC, so if this is one of the main reasons for buying the ReadyNAS then there may be alternatives out there that are a bit less work.

I bought this to use as a home server to safely store all the files in our household so as to make them accessible from any of our three computers. I haven't tried Bit Torrent or any of the photo sharing stuff yet.

Although you can buy this product with one disk ready installed, I would recommend purchasing it without disks as fitting the drives is so easy and you will save a great deal of money - in my case well over £150. Four screws (provided) to fit the drive into the caddy, slide it in and click to lock - no connectors to push on. Took me less than 4 minutes to put in 2 1TB disks. Before buying your disks check the compatibility list on the Netgear website - not all disks are compatible. The NAS checked for upgrades during install and then re-flashed the system which was reassuring.

Print server works well for a USB printer either by pointing at the NAS in My Computer / Network Places and installing or using IPP (Apple Bonjour) which is pre-installed on the NAS and is easily downloaded from the web onto each PC - this seems to be the faster option in a Windows XP environment and is very easy to set up. Just start Bonjour, it automatically 'discovers' the printer and then you set up in the normal way - 'have disk' etc.

New folders are easy to create and can be mapped as normal to persistent shares. The daily timed start-up and shut-down works well so you can set the NAS to power itself down during the night. The NAS fan comes on at full speed for the first few seconds after start-up but then becomes almost silent. To my ears, it's still a little too noisy for living room use, but I use a passively cooled PC in the lounge to avoid cooling fan noise so perhaps I'm a bit fussy.

If you install two disks it automatically configures RAID disk mirroring so if one disk fails you should still have all your files safe on the other. This however brings me to the reason for four stars not five. When I brought this box, I didn't appreciate that the disk format Netgear uses is proprietary. This means you cannot take your disk out of the NAS and read it in another computer if the NAS itself fails. Your files will still be there on disk but you have to get another NAS to read them or return the disks to Netgear. This may seem a technical point but, in my case, it means that I will have to back the NAS itself up to ensure data security. In some ways, this negates using disk mirroring. To ensure the files are in a standard format, the back-up will be via a PC on the network connected to an external hard drive and not via the NAS back-up USB connection.

However, all in all, this is a very good product, good value and very easy to set up.

After *much* fretting, faffing, and googling, in an effort to get things working, I now have a new ReadyNas Duo serving music to a Netgear Squeezebox Boom, holding backups of all my documents and photos, attaching a usb printer to the network, and I can say, yes, its great. Is exactly what I was looking for.

However, I am not happy about how easily much of the hassle could have been avoided by a bit more effort (pre-install the latest versions of software) and documentation (especially for the barebones NAS) from Netgear up front.

To Those Who Come After, I offer the following snippets of hard-won hindsight:

- if you have the barebones RND2000, insert the first drive *before* you first connect the NAS to the network. Could not find this written down anywhere (the documentation with the NAS itself and on the readynas site does not seem to stretch to cover the RND2000), and spent ages trying all sorts of things to get the NAS to appear on the network, including booting the NAS off a USB stick (which may or may not have helped at all).

- it does seem substantially cheaper to buy the barebones readynas duo and get a drive for it separately.

- despite what Amazon tells you on the product page, you do *not* need to buy the drive connectors in addition to the drive. The disk drive unit screws directly into one of the removable frames in the NAS and that then slides into the main unit and connects up the drive inside.

- if you have Vista, prepare for a world of pain. The network view did not and still does not show the NAS, but it was eventually possible to access the NAS via \\nas-AB-CD-EF (where A-F are the numbers specific to your own instance of the NAS).

- RAIDar (from the CD) does not fill me with confidence. It works now, but did not for ages. I may even have gone to the readynas web site for the latest version. All it does is locate the NAS on the network.

- use IE or Firefox (perhaps) but not Chrome as your browser to view the NAS pages.

- NTI shadow (from the CD) did not work properly at all. Very flaky. Lost the plot over access to read-only directories. But since all it does is allow you to schedule backups from your pc to the NAS, there are loads of (free) alternatives. I downloaded a copy of Cobian Backup 9, and so far so good.

- takes ages (hours and hours) to write tens of gigs of data to the NAS.

- the squeezebox server software pre-installed on the NAS is more trouble that it is worth since it is so out of date. You need to manually install a recent version, otherwise your squeezebox player will complain about format conflict or something along those lines, and download a new copy of the firmware to itself to be compatible with the server, then the same happens again if you switch the player back to have mysqueezebox.com as the server, and then again when you switch back to the NAS, and then again when... Or you could upgrade the server software on the NAS.

- attaching a usb printer to the NAS does work, although sending the document to the printer is a bit slower than usual. My HP printer was so old (4 years!) that there was no printer driver on the list of possibles, so it needed a bit of digging to find a compatible printer driver.

- you can share your Favourites from the mysqueezbox.com site by exporting to OPML, copying the file onto the NAS, then importing the file via the NAS' squeezecenter Favourites page.

- and no doubt some more stuff I've forgotten.