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I purchased the ReadyNAS NV+ before Netgear bought Infrant. It gets better- power is needed to remove the 4 drives from the box. Suddenly the unit died with a "pop" and the smell of a fried power supply. He told me that the unit was no longer under warranty (1 year for Infrant boxes, 5 years for Netgear boxes) and that Netgear can not provide any repairs.
I expected more from a "top rated" product which is designed to prevent data loss. I asked the rep how to get the drives out of a dead unit. He came back on and told me that the engineer recommended that I search the Netgear NAS user forum. BTW: I googled "ReadyNas NV+ replacement power supply" and found that PC Connection sells one for $115. The call ended with the tech guy saying "Thank you for choosing Netgear products". The unit worked flawlessly on a Gigabit Ethernet allowing users to share files and as a print server for over 2 years.
He put me on hold while he inquired with a "hardware engineer". Hope this fixes my problem. I called Netgear and eventualy spoke to a "technical" support person. I jokingly commented that I should just through the unit away and buy a new one- the rep said that was my best option (guy was American).
The software could be a bit more updated, however it is effective. Equipment:Netgear RND4000-100NAS ReadyNAS NV+ 4-Bay Desktop Network Storage (No Disk)4 @ Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1 TB SATA 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000333ASSetup:I recently setup the ReadyNAS NV+ on my home gigabit network with 4TB of post installed Seagate hard drives. The install went very smoothly after I tested each drive in a desktop system to ensure drive integrity. For some of you considering this NAS device, consider the price carefully to your needs.
I started the process of moving over ~500 CDs of music, 20000+ high res digital pictures, ~100 hours of HD video, as well as other data I want backed up.Price:The ReadyNAS NV+ is fairly pricey in comparison to some other NAS devices, however it is feature packed, expandable and comes highly rated from those user/reviewers that are knowledgeable. When it comes to my data, price is less of a matter. I did not run benchmark software but am going by my gut feel after 20+ years of computing. Performance is about equivalent to a single remote network drive access.
The syncing of the drives took a long period of time, somewhere between 20-30 hours. To/from file access is a bit slower than a local drive but what else would one expect. Typically I'm a WD person but the Amazon goldbox deal of $80/ea was just too good to pass up. I renamed the device, added user/group access security, shares, etc all without issue.Drive Access:The NAS shares are accessible on all computers as well as my PS3.
I believe their example was 250GB.Setup/Interface:The software provided is a web interface to the NAS and is fairly straight forward. Default setup is XRAID.Upon powerup, the NAS initialized the device within about 10-15 minutes. I did not note the exact time because the instructions say this can take 10+ hours initially based upon the size of the drives installed and each drive was 1TB for my setup.
We replaced an 8 year old Win2K desktop system (not a server mind you) with this unit and the decrease in performance was noticeable (10 - 20% slower). We've had one of these units for almost two years. Apparently its much easier to have your customers do all the legwork than to write some diagnostics for your hardware.Stick with that old repurposed desktop as a file server, you'll be happier. Performance on a 1 Gb/sec network isn't considerably better than on a 100 Mb/sec network.Support from Netgear consists primarily of them telling you to do system resets, firmware reinstalls and finally factory resets (where you get to reinstall all your data and configuration information). On the bright side we haven't lost any data; but the system is very slow. This applies to both its file serving and its poorly designed web admin interface (you won't believe how slow it is and what a pain it is to use).
The ReadyNAS makes this super easy because you can just get an inexpensive USB drive and attach it for backup, which is what I've done. As for reliability, I had this stuffed in a dusty attic through the very hot part of last year which I'm sure contributed to the power supply failing.The design of this unit is very good, and its open to the point that there are many extensions available for it in the great forum. It was painless. I recommend pulling all the drives out about once every 6 months or a year to avoid this happening.
My unit came with only a one year warranty, and I just had a power supply failure and called support and without any discussion they shipped me a replacement power supply for free. started making noises and I swapped it out. I've had one of these for about 3 plus years. since before Netgear bought Infrant who originally created this great product. Lots of user to user help there too. They can be revived with a little careful exercise to get them back to life.
I did have one drive fail about 6 months ago. As for some of the negative comments and reviews, several of them are misdirected. The ReadyNAS has indicators to tell you that a drive failed, so there really is no reason for this to happen unless you are incredibly unlucky. You should still have a backup of your data in case a rare situation occurs like two drives failing. The only complaint I have is that its fan is a little loud. Also, RAID is not backup. I have been very impressed with its performance and more importantly, the support is awesome.
Any RAID system is going to lose data if you have two drives fail. Also, the buttons on the trays will get stuck after a while if you don't exercise them periodically. Not too many companies offer that kind of support. Not that big of a deal to me, but might be a problem if you are planning for it to be in your living room or something.
It transfer at a maximum 24 MB/s but it has a GB ethernet NIC so go figure. Last but not least the costumer support takes ages to answer any question.The only way to use this is to give full permission to everyone and make one folder and put everything there. If you are not an IT expert dont buy this product.If you are an IT expert and want to spend hours configuring and tweaking a device just to get minimum results you can buy this. In all my years as an IT manager never before have i seen anything as inefficient and troublesome as this thing is. Do not try to manage permission for multiple user with this garbage. It losses permissions randomly, is slow, it doesn't work well with windows domains, it doesn't work well with CIFS. It comes with an app named raidar to configure it but sometimes the app wont let you do it (options are grayed out) and it will not give any reason for not letting you configure the device.
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