(Contra-?)recommendations on consumer-grade NAS?

[Guy B. Purcell]

On Oct 26, 2008, at 8:37 AM, Brent Chapman wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Holt Sorenson <hso at nosneros.net>  
> wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 12:35:27PM -0700, David Mack wrote:
>>> If you want an appliance type NAS system that does NFS, make sure  
>>> that
>>> they advertise that feature.
>>
>> Many people have very positive things to say about Infrant ReadyNAS  
>> (now
>> NetGear) if you are trying to buy (instead of build):
>>
>> http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx
>> http://www.readynas.com/
>
> I've had one of these at home for the past year or so, and it has been
> just fine.  A couple of my home Macs back up to it every night (one
> via Retrospect, the other via SuperDuper!), and I keep my music
> collection on it.  I blogged a review of it after I'd had it for a few
> weeks:
>
> http://www.greatcircle.com/blog/2008/01/09/great_little_so.html


I'll "third" the recommendations for the Netgear ReadyNAS.  I did  
substantial research on these types of boxes about a year ago for  
BayLISA, and we ended up getting a pair of these for our video  
collection because they were well-rated & the only system at the time  
that met all our criteria--one of which was complete OS autonomy.   
Brent's comments & blog detail things pretty well, so I won't drive  
that road, too; however, I'll say that I liked it so much after I  
played with the BayLISA boxes that I bought one for myself.  Buy.com  
occasionally runs a special on these (free extra disk for the 2-disk  
models), so I bought ours there.

Personal note:  these work fine as Mac Time Machine backup targets, in  
addition to the backup solutions Brent mentioned.

Ttechnical notes:  Netgear's latest product in this line is a six-disk  
unit with a HW RAID controller (standard 4-disk NV+ model that I have  
is SW RAID).  They also make 1U rack-mount versions for those  
preferring that form factor.

-Guy