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Released: 2009-07-09 Rating:  More Details: Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 Home Storage Solution ( 2 Bay ) - No Drives Included Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 Home Storage Solution ( 2 Bay ) - No Drives Included @Amazon Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 Home Storage Solution ( 2 Bay ) - No Drives Included @aStore |
Customer Reviews:
First Class Home NAS Solution
I bought this unit to replace my SC101 file server for which I can no longer buy P-ATA discs at a reasonable price. I bought the empty unit and 2x Western Digital 1TB Green Disks.
Only had the unit a week, but first impressions are:
- Adding the disks is easy
- It's nothing like as big as it looks - the front is only 1cm each way bigger than my standard UK passport
- It's quiet - for a couple of minutes after power up the fan is quite noisy, but after that it's really not noticable
- The huge difference between this and the SC101 is the software. This is much, much better, in fact more like industry strength. RAID just works, backups are easy, and sure if you examined every option on the setup you might get confused, but just accept the dafaults, they really do work.
This is a really good solution for sharing storage between a number of computers on a small network, but don't be lulled into a false sense of security and think everything is sorted, because on it's own it's not enough. RAID is great - 2 copies of everything - have to say I am seriously impressed, but what if the device fails (it happens), you get hit by lightning, or your house goes on fire? So!
1. Backup regularly to another device, e.g. a spare hard drive in your computer,
2. Make sure you have a surge protected power adapter
3. Take a regular copy off-site to Mum's or wherever.
4. Sound like overkill? - Maybe, but what price those photos of the kids when they were babies? Your call.
First class product. Well done again Netgear.
Noisy and two hardware failures out of two 
I bought one of these from a French Company that claims to be the biggest online retailer in Europe. Big mistake! It didn't work and I'm still waiting for a refund after many months. I was also informed that UK law did not apply to them as they are a French company! As they couldn't supply a replacement unit, in a satisfactory time, I bought another one from a different retailer. This one didn't work either.
The first unit was totally dead. No lights, no noise, no anything! The second unit would constantly flash all the front lights but could not be connected to by the Netgear software or via the IP address. I phoned Netgear support and my heart sank when I discovered their call centre is based in India. When I've called the Amazon support staff I've spoken to people in the Phillipines and Ireland. Each time it has been a great experience from people who genuinely seem to want to help. Each time I've called an Indian call centre the experience has been terrible. Netgear was no exception. It would have been quicker and easier if they just had said they knew NOTHING about the product. They did not know what it meant if the lights were all flashing. I spoke to a number of different support engineers and the experience was the same each time. Each one referred the issue to an "expert" but that expert had no idea what the lights flashing meant either. Each time I was asked to return the ReadyNAS to Netgear at MY COST!
So I can't tell if the ReadyNAS is a good solution or not. What I can say is that the ReadyNAS makes a huge amount of noise. It was sat next to my quad core PC and it made at least 20 times more noise than the PC makes. Only my desktop fan makes more noise. It also had yet another power pack. Why can't they build the power supply into these units rather than having so many of these power packs trailing around the office? The European Parliment seems to enforce so many rules, can't they at least come up with one standard auto-selecting voltage power supply that all companies have to adhere to? At the very least surely these companies can put the product name on the power supply. Try disconnecting a number of these in the average office and then connect the right ones to the right devices. Not easy!
My advice to anyone considering buying one of these would be to look at using a desktop PC instead. You could buy a case, motherboard, cpu, and memory for less than the ReadyNAS and most motherboards these days have raid support built in. That way you have more control and can fix anything that goes wrong. Install Linux and the PC can do far more than the ReadyNAS can do, but most importantly you are not stuck with a dead product and a support centre that can't help. Building a PC is easy and many companies will do it for you. The ReadyNAS is nothing more than a very under-powered computer, with very slow CPU and very little memory. It almost certainly is running a version of Linux but one that Netgear has "adapted". If it works, and if you can find a way of stopping it making so much noise, then it is a cute little device. If it doesn't work, or fails after warranty, it is just a big dead weight. Even if it fails within warranty it is not cheap to return it to Netgear each time.
And don't expect to get any help from Netgear's call centre. I got the distinct impression that they had never actually seen the device! Lastly, consider what disks will be supported in the unit in the future. All disks fail and you can only install Netgear "approved" disks in the ReadyNAS. What happens if they decide it is a "no longer supported product" and they no longer approve new disks for it?
A bit quirky, but does the job 
After quite a bit of fiddling, to get the settings right, it seems to be doing its main job of being a RAID controller / NAS device. It's a bit flaky, in terms of its interface, and there are a few gotchas in there - e.g., you can't name a share to match the Windows Username ... if you do, you can't access the drive whatsoever. Some of the extras in there make no sense to me (picture sharing?), and the built-in Torrent software leaves a bit to be desired (it doesn't support encryption, and so many who torrent will ONLY share encrypted). Other than these things, though, it's a reasonably good buy. I'd not buy it again, but now that I have it, I'll keep it.
Excellent
Excellent high-capacity storage device for a home network of 2-5 PCs.
RAID1 means any file saved on the NAS is actually copied to two separate physical hard-drives, so if one disc has a corrupt sector or whatever then it's easy to read the 'mirror' version.
Even better, it includes a great piece of software to 'shadow' specified folders (e.g. My Documents etc.)from each PC to the NAS so that whenever one alters a file on the PC's C: drive the software immediately makes a copy (or to be precise two copies given it is RAID1) on the NAS to give full two-belts-and-braces protection against data loss.
Good but not very fast
If you want network attached storage (NAS), then this is a good value option to consider. Its cpu is not very fast, especially if you enable extra services like BitTorrent. But the IO performance is OK and it's good to have a RAID system at this reasonable price.
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