Your experiences with Netgear ReadyNAS?

[AngryTechnician]

I'm currently looking at buying a Netgear ReadyNAS (specifically the ReadyNAS 2100 4TB - RNRX4410) primarily for use as an iSCSI target for Hyper-V. Done a quick search and found no-one reporting disastrous experiences with the ReadyNAS line, but as I've not used them myself before I'd be interested in hearing any and all experiences you've had with them.

 

Good, bad, ugly - all thought appreciated!

[andy_d]

Can't think of anything bad about them, does what it says on the tin, our non rackmount one has been solid since we had it, config etc was easy, can't think of anything else to say really, I would certainly have another one if it was needed.

[stevenlong1985]

Im thinking of get one too let me know how your getting on!

[Midget]

DO NOT expect to ever recover any data off them when they fail, make sure you have backups of whatever is stored on there.

[AngryTechnician]

DO NOT expect to ever recover any data off them when they fail, make sure you have backups of whatever is stored on there.

What was the difficulty you encountered with this? I presumed that with the RAID5 it would simply be a case of replacing a failed drive and allowing the array to rebuild (unless you lost 2 drives, but you're pretty much screwed with any RAID5 if that happens).

[RabbieBurns]

Sorry for hijacking the thread but its kind of relevent. Im looking at getting a NAS, not really sure what to get.

 

Would be looking at getting a 4 disk solution with built in raid, that I could just add disks to.

 

Do they support SMB / NFS so I can access them as a shared folder?

 

I have been shown the Data Robotics Drobo thing, but that seems a helluva lot of money, especially as the network share addon is a couple of hundred bucks extra.

[Midget]

What was the difficulty you encountered with this? I presumed that with the RAID5 it would simply be a case of replacing a failed drive and allowing the array to rebuild (unless you lost 2 drives, but you're pretty much screwed with any RAID5 if that happens).

 

I used to be a Data Recovery Engineer. Lots of experiance.

[AngryTechnician]

Midget, are are you talking about if the actual NAS device itself fails, or if a hard drive fails? Surely they can't be selling a RAID5 solution that can't cope with a disk failing?

[glensc]

I've been looking at getting a, smaller, netgear NAS, and noted that recently they updated the RAIDiator firmware to 4.1.6

Amongst other things bug fix 4 suggest there was a problem with failed disks overwritting

 

4. Fixed X-RAID disk signature handling to prevent inadvertent overwriting of disk in failure condition.

 

 

http://www.readynas.com/?p=2620

Edited July 23, 2009 by glensc
Added link

[Midget]

Midget, are are you talking about if the actual NAS device itself fails, or if a hard drive fails? Surely they can't be selling a RAID5 solution that can't cope with a disk failing?

 

If the unit fails there is a high chance you'll lose the data (or ~£3k for recoving the data). If ONE HDD fails and you catch it you'll be fine

[DMcCoy]

I've used an older one here for a few years, the features are very good, the speed on the non atom based ones was pretty bad though. I believe it uses the software based raid features provided by linux rather than a hardware solution, although many similar priced storage systems will be the same.

 

cifs, nfs, afp all at once was good, along with decent AD support.

[azrael78]

I have one here at home for backup purposes only.

 

I got it cheap off EBay (it's not brand new and it's not the most recent) but I've never had a days trouble with it. As others have said - does exactly what it says on the tin.

 

Az

[mac_shinobi]

can't you just build your own computer with a gigabit nic or two and a raid card with the correct amount of hard drives and correct type of hard drives and use something like free nas or open filer ?

[AngryTechnician]

can't you just build your own computer with a gigabit nic or two and a raid card with the correct amount of hard drives and correct type of hard drives and use something like free nas or open filer ?

I did consider it, but I would rather have something with a solid 5-year warranty on the entire unit, which the Netgear has. The small form factor is not easy to self build either, and that's important for this deployment.

[mac_shinobi]

Products - Aria PC

[mac_shinobi]

DO NOT expect to ever recover any data off them when they fail, make sure you have backups of whatever is stored on there.

 

Just to re iterate what midget said above and also what about HP, Dell or the likes as far as NAS devices go ?

 

Don't they do rack mounted NAS devices ?

[Midget]

I would never buy any netgear NAS devices, especially not for business use. There are much better devices out there. If you can't use FreeNAS for warranty reasons then look at enterprise grade NAS devices with good DR reviews. There are alot of really cack ones out there that you are completely unable to recover from if the unit fails

[mac_shinobi]

I would never buy any netgear NAS devices, especially not for business use. There are much better devices out there. If you can't use FreeNAS for warranty reasons then look at enterprise grade NAS devices with good DR reviews. There are alot of really cack ones out there that you are completely unable to recover from if the unit fails

 

Which ones would you suggest / advise ?

[Midget]

off the top of my head I think the Snap Servers and QNAP NASs were the best, but this was 2+ years ago