Netgear ReadyNas NV+ 4-bay NAS Drive Enclosure w/ Gigabit & speeds up to 25MBps (Diskless)

Pros: I just purchased my second NV+. The setup is so easy, you attach the drives to the carriers, plug in the drives and turn the unit on. It does the rest. Formats, sets up the raid, and you're set to go. Pros are expandable raid that supports up to 1.5 terrabyte drives, but if you don't want to start that big, you can start with 250 or 500 gb drives then when ready, replace one at a time. When all 4 have been replaced, the NAS expands to the new size. Nice !

Cons: Single point of failure - Yes, the drives are protected with raid 5, so that if a drive is lost, a new drive may be put in it's place and you're on your way. the unit rebuilds the drive. But, if the unit itself dies, then it's a trip back to Netgear for replacement. I'm an avid photographer, and my NAS already has nearly 2 terrabytes of data. I had a problem in April with my original NAS (Infrant (bought out by Netgear) NV). I was sweating bullets when the new NV+ arrived and I had to put my old drives into the new unit. Luckily, nothing was lost. It was an eye opener however. It showed that even though the drives were all protected. the unit wasn't.

Overall Review: These are incredible units for storing large amounts of data, but be sure to have a contingency plan so that even as wonderful as these are, they should still be backed up.

Pros: 1) Power consumption and noise are very small indeed. Originally for my backup and storage needs I was considering FreeNAS box or a PC setup with RAID Cards. These draw much less power and take up much less space. 2) Ease of installing Hard drives and upgrading. Want to add another drive? Just slap it in, Raid-X will put in in place. Not QUICKLY, but it will. Again, for the price I can hardly complain at the speed. 3) Excellent storage capacity Vrs Price point. One of the cheapest going.

Cons: 1) Netgear's usual bang-up support team. As in there is no support. Don't count on it, be surprised if you get it. That being said they work pretty well out of the box. 2) Slow for the network speed. I write this off as having a slow processor and a sub-par network controller in it. It's Gigabit, but barely. Usual FTP transfer speeds of around 12-15 mb/s <megabytes> over my network. More then sufficient to stream music and HD movies. 3) OBEY THE HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY LIST. Man, one variation number off and nothing works. That said the WD and Samsung 2tb drives I have in my two units work perfectly, each at around 5.4 TB of redundant data. Not bad.

Overall Review: A note. Order the Diskless version. I don't know what Netgear is smoking when they come out asking 4-5 times as much as HDD's are worth for a preconfigured unit. Just add the drives yourself. Also, if you get one with disks in it (I ordered an open box) and I've hard from others who have ordered ones with disks loaded that apparently Netgear all but spot-welds the drives into that caddy. We had to DRILL out one screw to get it out, and those caddies go for around 20-25 bucks EACH. So, yea.. watch it. All and all, good for the price. I recommend it.

Pros: What a nice product! What a clueless support organization. As an IT consultant, I checked out lots of reviews and found this to look ideal for a client of mine in a mixed PC/Mac environment. I installed it in Dec 2007 and pretty much forgot about it. Since then (now Oct 2011) it has run almost flawlessly. I think it stopped running once and cleaned itself up after a reboot. The unit came from the factory with 2 x 500GB drives finally died last month. Strangely, I had replaced the hard drives with 2x1TB drives just a month prior. I guess the load was just too much for the power supply. Pretty good run for 4 years. Clients were really happy. I bought a new one (diskless) from Newegg.com and popped in the drives. It loaded the config from the drives and we were off. Couldn't be easier.

Cons: Upgrading the drives was about as simple as it could be. I just powered down the unit, replaced a drive, it rebuilt the X-RAID array automatically (took a day or so) then did the other drive. My support experience was less pleasant. Netgear , close down those jokes in the Philippines you call tech support shops!! They are clueless and hardly understand English. When you ask any question, they just automatically say yes. I asked the "tech" what the gateway address should be on my pc when hooking up directly and gave her 2 options. She just answered yes. I asked if she understood, once again "yes." After a few minutes, I had to give up. The online forums were very helpful. Good job on that.

Overall Review: Strangely, it turns out that the old NAS was still under warranty and that the power supply had been recalled so they said they would replace it. Shipping cost: $25. I couldn't dig up the receipt from 4 years ago and no amount of begging would get them to ship me one. Then they suggested that I could buy a new power supply for $26.95 - so I did that. Maybe that will get the old unit going again. I hope I didn't waste $26.95. I don't even know if I will ever see a replacement PSU or if perhaps those folks will send me the completely wrong part - who knows? Overall, nice product.

Pros: Allows you to expand disk capacity as you need it. Relatively easy to set up.

Cons: You do need at least a basic understanding of networking to configure it. Fan can be a little loud sometimes.

Overall Review: I've already owned an NV+ for over two years now. I ordered a second one as a addition to the original. The original was easy to setup and so was the new one. I had the system up and configured and running inside of an hour. That includes upgrading the RAM to 1GB. If you get one, get the 1GB RAM as well. It will make the performance that much better.

Pros: Great system when you base the price & specs. Before we purchased this, we viewed the compatibility list to make sure we could get the recommend parts upfront. We went with; 4 1tb ST31000340AS disk ( 2.7tb of storage + redundancy in X-raid or raid 5) 1 1gb KVR400X64SC3A/1G ram stick. After a small bump in the road (see other thoughts), we had this unit up and running in no time in our Windows environment. Also love the options, being able to config various backup jobs to usb hdd's was great. Plenty of security options to lock down this device. Emailing is a huge plus, notifies you of just about everything (which is great because this device is in another part of the floor). 5 Year warranty was a plus for us. After setup wizard, the unit detected an updated firmware and we installed it (recommend by tech support that you do)

Cons: So far everything has been great however if I had to pick out some things; 1. With 3 USB's it would have been nice to get 1 Esata connection 2. To swap out ram, you have to remove side plates and top plate. why not just create an access panel on top?? 3. we feel that the compatibility list is very limiting, I am a HUGE West Digital fan, and at this moment, their is not 1 1tb hdd on their list. Now yeah, I am sure if I purchased a west dig 1tb hdd it could work, but we love the fact that this nas has a 5 year coverage and I wouldn't want them not assisting us because we dont have a recommended hard drive.

Overall Review: As mentioned, we purchased all of the upgrades at the time of the initial purchased...so when i took it out of the box, I swapped out the included 256 stick of ram with the 1gb ram. This caused problems because the device wouldn't boot. No matter how many time we rebooted (with hdd install's and without). In fear that the 1gb ram was bad, I reswapped with the 256 and the unit turned right up. We finished the setup and swapped back in the 1gb, the NAS is up and kicking! Oh, we had a problem because in our documentation, it gave us the WRONG default password. It stated User - Admin, Pass - infrant1. However in our case, it was same user however netgear1 as pass. Hope this helps someone. I will post back in a couple months to give an update. As always feel free to gmail my nickname with questions or comments.

Pros: Before buying this, I had been running a build-it-yourself RAID box in linux to host backups and movies, but it required such a huge amount of maintenance, and it frequently dropped drives from the RAID set even though there was nothing wrong with the drives. I got really frustrated with that, so I started looking around for an alternative. The ReadyNAS fit the bill perfectly. Small, quiet, built-in RAID, easily expandable, and ethernet connectivity. Just what I was looking for. A couple of bonuses: - I plugged my HP printer into the usb port and it shares my printer over the network. So I can be sitting on the sofa with my laptop and print to the printer in the office. Very nice. Worked perfectly without any trouble. - You can play XVid/DivX movies off this box from an XBox 360 without a computer. It does not look or work like a media extender, but make sure you turn on uPNP and the XBox should be able to find this box.

Cons: There is a bright blue LED on the front that never goes off. It's annoying. It doesn't always startup well. Sometimes it seems to get stuck in the bootup process. Power cycling the box will get it to reboot and come back to life.

Overall Review: Note that you have to use specific Terabyte drive models - not every TB drive is supported. Make sure you pick one off the list. I used some of the Seagate Barracuda drives.

Pros: This is a very nice unit. I have purchased several of them for myself and for clients. Extremely well constructed, even if it looks a bit like a small space heater (grin). I do recommend updating to the latest firmware, which supports read/write access to external USB drives with NTFS file systems (the older versions were read-only with NTFS).

Cons: Takes a LONG time to initialize a volume upon first use (over 4 hours for 4x750GB X-RAID). And if there's an error due, for instance, to interruption of a transfer in a production environment, you will wait a long time when restarting while the device rescans the volume and fixes errors. However, this process usually recovers with ALL data intact. A little bit tricky to set user/group/share rights in "User" mode, but security seems very good once you understand how it works. The default security mode is much simpler if you don't need strong security.

Overall Review: I have a user-database problem with one NV+ and it took DAYS to get a response from level 3 support. And when they did respond, they got the problem that I reported wrong. I am still awaiting resolution, and this is a production unit. I expect that this will finally be resolved ok. Also, since Netgear purchased this company (it was originally called Infrant), the cost of the diskless NV+ has risen dramatically. It is still a good deal though, since it usually works well with few problems, and there is precious little competition at this performance level.

Pros: Fast setup (w/old FW), great build quality and interface (Maclike), small, easy to integrate. X-Raid works great. Excellent communications and other onboard services. Very cool running temps.

Cons: NOISY since fan/ps revision - TOO NOISY for living/quiet areas. Not as fast or as responsive as full server solution (but much cheaper). OEM settings require UPS for full corruption protection, or give up some speed with adjustments.

Overall Review: This is a first impression after 1 day. But you get what you pay for. Great for a smaller LAN where plug and play real HW Raid5 storage is wanted. Decent writes with GB speeds/jumbo frames. Hitachi A7K1000 series (750gb) DO work with it. Avoid buggy V4 firmware for now.