NETGEAR ReadyNAS 214 - NAS server - 4 bays - SATA 3Gb/s - RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD - RAM 2 GB - Gigabit Ethernet - iSCSI

The reason I looked at these is because I've had a ReadyNAS NV+ V2 for about 6 years and it was getting a little long in the tooth.I bought my first one of these in July 2019 and was really satisfied with the performance and usability. I got the second one in March 2020, and have been using the two as a pair of fault tolerant storage systems.This is an excellent product for home use, and even thought the spec here says it can go up to 24 TB, it has been designed to take larger disks to accommodate more storage. According to the Readynas Hard Disk Compatibility list, it can take up to 4x16TB disks.The two I have are configured with 4x4TB and 4x6TB drives respectively, and I've found the devices to be very easy to configure and very reliable.I have also set them up to be Time Machines for my Macs and they work really well for that purpose. You can configure how much disk space you want to assign to the Time Machine Backups, and also configure both shared and private Time Machines.Overall I'm really happy with the RN214s that I have

Simple to get up and running, simple to set up personal cloud and access from phone etc ehen away from home. I added 12Tb of storage in a raid 5. If you have a netgear swich you can bond the two ethernet ports, even with a normal switch/hub you can still use both to improve load balancing. Not too keen ont he documetnation for backups using RSYNC, most is for an older version of the operating system. You do need to make sure you get the latest firmware updates. For the hardcore users you can enable SSH root access and that gives you the full power of the linux distribution on which it runs. I have two in separate building, one backing up the other, one running subversion and mysql and the other offiering a web service too - you can do all that just picking apps off the menus. I have all my music, videos etc on it and DLNA to TV, hifi etc. My main use is to hold my photographic works and that runs to a few Tb. The apps screen offers Resilio Sync and that provides a simple (and free) means to set up syncronised folders across multiple PCs, tablets...My only gripe is that I has a few "slow downs" accesing shared folders from my PC. and I keep turning up out of date examples and documents when I search for help. Updates improved things, but then I found out I needed to adjust the paging fiile on the PC - strange but it worked.

Easy set upGreat HDD carrier system (no screws!)Simple but useful backlit info screenQuiet enough for desktop or domestic useInstant recognition and control through Insight app, but web portal is intuitive and good to use.Great design and execution Netgear!

If an extra external disk drive is plugged in it does not reconise it is there too fast and may need the NAS rebooting. There is a difference between the web interface and Windows File Explorer? I lost files on RAID 5. The unit keeps warning DATA: Degraded. The disk number LEDs blink to tell you what disk is faulty. It seems to be settling down now, but keep a separate backup of your data in case off loss.

I've upgraded from an old Netgear Duo (roughly 10yrs old - and still going strong but I out grew the 2TB limit).Only running a single drive so far (which might be speeding up write speeds) but managing 100MB/s write, which is the max of the single connection.Shares are much easier to set up the whole GUI is much improved (as you'd expect after 10years!)Very pleased with the redundancy and volume offered from a 4bay system.

I'm no slouch with computers having spent decades working in tech support and managing systems from the home level up to enterprise infrastructure including raid systems. Having said that I found setting this system up to be very frustrating and had some serious niggles that were major sources of annoyance. Once it was up and running everything seems fine but those initial headaches really soured my experience of it.On initial setup it insists you change the password, which is a great practise for security, however it promptly forgot it so after it rebooted as part of the wizard it would no longer let me log in with the old or the new password, meaning an immediate factory reset to regain access. I know what you are thinking, perhaps I typed the password wrong when I was setting it up, I initially thought the same, yet this happened 3 times in a row!Firmware updates. After I had finally managed to get access again I had set a new password and rebooted and still had to use the old password to get in, it asked for a firmware update. Again it had to download and perform this update multiple times before it actually realised yes it had performed the update. Yes in each occasion it was updating from the same old version to the same new version.Share naming. I set up an array and shared it with the network only to find it was maxed out at around 10 percent of the maximum storage capacity. Eventually through trial and error I found out that if your NAS box and the share you are trying to use are named the same thing it causes problems, as soon as I changed the name of the share to something else it allowed me to go past 10% capacity.Is it working now? Well apart from taking what seems like an inordinately long time ( as long as 30 seconds some times) to spin up the drives and start sending data if it hasn't been accessed in a while, yes it does seem to work ok now.

Loaded with 3xSeagate Ironwolf 8TB. Easy to set up, does what it says on the tin, excellent performance (consistently over 90 MB/s read & write over a single gigabit ether connection). The Netgear ReadyNAS devices may not have as many "bells and whistles" as some competitors but this really isn't a problem. Just be aware that building a 24TB RAID 5 volume (using X-Raid configuration) takes the best part of 24 hours, I don't see there's any way out of this (my ReadyNAS 104 with 4x4TB drives takes over 3 days).