Customer Reviews
Love It 
2008-09-15
I have to be honest in saying that I was excited to receive this and get it setup on my home network to server as my central backup. Within days of operation one of the drives started complaining and the 'smart' errors starting increasing. A call to Netgear's customer support and a new drive was on its way - no charge - not even shipping.
It is now working great. It took some time to get it setup and configured they way I need to use it, but not it is working great!
I would recommend it to anyone.
Great storage solution 
2008-04-29
I have attached this to our home network with an iMac, a PC and a Mac Mini attached to our TV. I use it to store music, photos and video. I got a sony hi def video camera at christmas so I already have an enormous amount of hi def video (imported through imovie). My network is connected with gigabit ethernet using an apple airport. The last NAS I had did not stream the HD video fast enough (using SMB) to the computers or the TV. This NAS works perfectly. I can stream HD video from it through the mini to the tv with no delays or glitches in the sound or video. I got it with 2 500 GB drives and added two 320 drives I had from the old NAS. It works perfectly but unfortunately when you mix different size drives and use the default x-raid setting, it sees all of the drives as the same size as the smallest. So I am not utilizing 180 GB (500-320) from the two 500 GB drives. My total storage capacity is approximaetly 900 GB while the raw capacity is 1,640. I do not yet need even the 900 GB so it isn't that big of a deal. I will just keep my eye open for 2 more 500 GB drives on sale to increase the capacity when needed. All other functions work great. As I mentioned I am in a mac centric network so the AFP file sharing protocol is great - probably why the trasnfer rates are high enough to support HD video.
Great Device Until NetGear Bought The Company 
2008-04-23
This device is very functional, great pricing, robust, full of features and add-ons. Maybe not the fastest NAS on the block, but for home use, holding huge amounts of data, and streaming media back to us, was always great. Reasonable web-based interface as well. Right up until NetGear took over and brought out the latest firmware upgrade. Never had a problem before, but this upgrade, which should not touch your data volume, messes with the volume format without warning, irreversibly, and large numbers of people have had problems with their units afterward. Mine won't boot with the new firmware, and if I go back to the old version I can no longer access my data. Essentially turned my NAS into an expensive brick, and tech support is unhelpful as they have no real resolution.
Save yourself some headaches and Do Not Buy. Was a great company, oh well.
A piece of junk 
2008-04-05
I brought this and 4 500 GB WD drives to backup my system. It hanged twice this morning and a dozen times since I purchased couple month ago. I am not heavy user, only turn it on when I need it, run a day or two continuously. I am usually just copying a lot of small files (20000 files ranging from 20KB to 300MB).
Everytime it hangs, there is no way to shut it down except unplug the power. This will trigger a filesystem check, which take hours. Worst yet, I had one occasion that the fs check stuck and I have to unplug the power again.
At this point, I am just afraid of losing my data. That's the reason I am backing up all my file from the ReadyNAS onto a RAID 1 eSATA local drive using a Rosewill adapter.
If you care about your data, don't use this as backup. It cause me more problem than using USB or local drive.
has a major software bug 2008-03-01
I own a large number of NetGear (formerly Infrant) NAS devices. After NetGear bought the company, they came out with a new version of the embedded OS of those devices that looks like it is mostly just a cosmetic update that changes the name Infrant to NetGear.
Unfortunately, it also introduces a very serious and reproducible bug for Apple Macintosh users. When you mount one of the NAS boxes running the new version of the OS under AppleShare, a file copied to the NAS box always gets today's date as its creation date. Strangely, if you copy a folder, the folder date is set correctly to the original creation date of the source folder, but the files contained inside of it lose their original creation dates.
This bug occurs ONLY under the new version of the OS (4.00), not under the previous version (3.01). It occurs both under OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
I have spent considerable time on hold and on the phone with NetGear technical support, and they claim this is a problem with the AFS file protocol. I don't know how they can make this claim when quite evidently everything works just fine under the previous version of their own software, but the gentleman on the phone basically told me something to the effect of "nobody uses AFS anyway, so why should we care".
If you are an Apple owner and are considering a NAS box, you may want to hold off on purchasing a NetGear device for the time being. Using Samba file sharing is not really an option either, because that severely limits your file naming possibilities. This is a real error and NetGear needs to fix it.
Nice, easy but slow 2008-02-14
ReadyNAS NV+ was designed specifically for home offices, small businesses and workgroups. Never before has there been available a cost-conscience Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance packed with robust high-end server features, including Gigabit Ethernet, hardware RAID, system monitoring capabilities and built-in backup. ReadyNAS couples out of the box deployment and easy management with robust file serving and data redundancy.
This is an excellent NAS 2008-02-10
I had the Netgear NV+ up and running in about 10 minutes. Very easy to configure, create directories and get all the computers on the network to see and use. We moved our Quickbook files onto the NAS NV+ and are stored for all computers on the network to access them from there. It's quick and safe because we are using the drives redundently in case one fails.
I am doing all backups of all non application files (documents, photos, ect.) onto the NV+ for each of the networked computers also.
great product. with a few execptions 2007-12-21
Overall I really like this product. It is fast and easy to use. The exception to that is the initial load. It took 2 and a half days of nearly constant transferring to load up 1.2 T, I can't remember the exact speeds but it was double what I expected. The only other issue I have had is with the print server. I have a HP printer which like many of todays printers requires a separate software install. If you Can Not have windows auto install your printer without downloading additional drivers, you are Not going to be able to use this product as your print server.
Fast, works great with Windows and Linux 2007-12-01
It's a little more expensive than other brands I've seen, but I'm very happy with it and didn't mind spending a little more to get exactly what I wanted.
It works great with my Linux and Windows computers at home (and also works with Mac, although I don't have one to test with). For Windows you map a drive through Windows Explorer, for Linux you run "mount" using NFS.
I was able to share and use the same files/directories on both operating systems without any problems. The fact it works so well with Linux was a big reason I bought this over other brands I looked at. However, note that according to its documentation, its print server only supports Windows and Mac clients. For me that's less of an issue since I primarily use my Linux for development and can print everything on Windows.
It came ready to go out of the box, the disks were already set up for X-RAID, their proprietary RAID technology that's basically RAID-5 but manages volume expansion so you can add/replace disks more easily. It also offers RAID 0, 1 and 5, although since it has 4 disk drive bays and drives are so cheap now, I'd recommend only using RAID 5 or X-RAID. It's hot swappable so you can replace disks without shutting it down. If a single drive fails, you can replace it without losing any data (except RAID 0).
If you want to use RAID 0/1/5 instead of the default X-RAID, change it before you move files to the system (or back them up first), since according to their documentation changing it will erase all of the data.
It supports gigabit ethernet speeds, but my PCs don't yet, so the transfer rate copying files to the ReadyNAS was about 3-4 MB/sec, and about 9-10 MB/sec copying from it. According to CNET's editor review, they were able to write a 5 GB test file to it in 18 minutes, and read the file back from it in 13 minutes (the 13 min read time was the fastest of any of the NAS servers they tested).
The RAIDar software it comes with found it on the network right away. Among other things, RAIDar shows you the current RAID status, disk usage, fan speed, and the temperatures of the unit and each drive.
The web interface provides alot of control over it. One feature I really like is that you can configure it to send alerts to multiple email addresses (and text messages to your cell phone) for various conditions such as drive failures, excess temperatures, disk quotas exceeded, power failures (if UPS connected), etc. Another feature I like is an option to let the drives sleep after a configurable period of inactivity.
With the latest firmware, I was also able to use SSH to connect directly to its filesystem. Obviously you want to be careful if you do this to avoid changing/deleting system files. That would not be good.
Only a few issues so far:
- I can't access the ReadyNAS while connected to my office's VPN, but that's a security "feature" of the VPN software to secure the company's network and also to prevent IP address collisions. Just thought I should mention it in case other people have the same problem. The VPN software is configurable to disable this, but turning it off leads to other problems since my home network subnet is also used at work (they tell us to use a specific subnet at home to avoid collisions but my router doesn't allow changing the subnet).
- The web interface uses javascript alert pop ups for every confirmation, which gets a little tiring. But I can live with it, considering how much control the web interface gives you over the ReadyNAS. Hopefully they'll change this in a future firmware update.
- Its built-in SMTP to send the email alerts didn't work for me; I had to provide my own email account's SMTP settings to get it to work. Their user guide indicated that some network issues require this, although I'm not sure why mine did.
- As mentioned above, the print server doesn't support Linux.
I haven't used all of its features yet, but so far I really like it and am glad I went with this one.
Great idea, but flawed 2007-10-25
We needed shared storage with redundancy, and the ability to back itself up to an externally attached drive. Both key features of this product. The setup interface is simple and easy to use. It has lightning fast connections to our Macs with 1000baseT. And it looks cool! Unfortunately we've experienced two major issues with it since purchase: it fails to backup to our remote USB drive (one that is on the list of acceptable according to Netgear), and we're having issues with our shares ever since upgrading the recommended firmware. Customer service has been slow with very little answers. After months of not having our issues fully addressed, we decided to move to another solution for our workgroup.
