speleofool

Hello, fellow audiophiles. I've just recently taken the first steps toward building my computer-based audio solution, and the very first of those first steps was getting a NAS to house my collection. I ended up going with a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro and so far am thrilled with it. Of course, at this stage the bulk of my enthusiasm is based on features I haven't used yet (like growing my storage by adding new drives) and a few days of early use that have gone well. My feelings may well be colored by the bliss of suddenly having convenient access on my home system to so much of my music and the fact that I don't really have any other NAS devices to compare to the one I got. I haven't really seen much about the ReadyNAS on this site. Are others here using them? Do you like them? Are there problems? I spent a long time in a cycle where I was enticed by Drobo's BeyondRAID technology, but turned off by persistent customer complaints about their performance. When I stumbled on the ReadyNAS it seemed like it had the same capabilities as BeyondRAID, but with much faster access speed. Frankly, so far my experience has backed that up. Out of the box, setup was very easy. I plugged in 6 x 2TB green drives and 4 hours later I had a big XRAID2 volume visible to my PC and new Mac Mini. I didn't really have to configure anything. One of the first thing I did with the NAS was to migrate my scratch iTunes library with about 8,000 compressed songs (for my iPod) from my PC to the ReadyNAS for playback from the Mac while I work on ripping my whole collection. The copy was fast. Not super-lightning fast or anything, but I immediately understood how speeds in the range of 20 MB/s would get old in a hurry. I have plenty of other "junk" on my PC to back up, like personal photos and videos, so it's nice to have responsive speed on the ReadyNAS. Finally, the one feature I don't expect to test for a while is expanding my storage. The coolest thing about the Drobo to me is how you can hot swap in bigger drives and it will grow your storage for you. Well, ReadyNAS with XRAID2 is supposed to do exactly the same thing. Or at least the core points seem to match (drive sizes don't need to match, and with minor limitations and no user intervention all you need to do is pull out a small drive and put in a bigger one and your volume grows). If there are technical differences between how BeyondRAID and XRAID2 work either they remain under the hood where they don't lead to meaningful differences to me in terms of convenience or else I missed something. At a glance they seem like practically identical solutions to me. Well, that's my experience. +1 for ReadyNAS from me, at least so far. I'm curious to see what others have to say. Cheers! Chip.

Thanks for the review. I've just started getting into computer-based audio after years of waiting for mass storage to get affordable, and I just picked up a NAS over the holidays.<br /> <br /> I really wanted to like Drobo (the concept is awesome), but consistent complaints about I/O performance finally scared me off. I was almost ready to throw in the towel when I discovered Netgear's ReadyNAS family and XRAID2, which near as I can tell seems to offer a very similar expansion strategy to Drobo's BeyondRAID--just swap out smaller disks for larger ones and grow your volume over time. However, the Netgear seems to have better I/O performance.<br /> <br /> I've got a technical background so ease of use and integration was not at the top of my requirements, but when I got my ReadyNAS and hooked it up I found it every bit as simple as I expected the Drobo to be. All I had to do was hook it up to the network and add drives and once the volumes were done building the default shares for "media" and "backup" were visible and usable from both my PC and my Mac.<br /> <br /> I don't mean to turn this post into an advertisement for Netgear, but I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen more buzz about ReadyNAS here. Does anyone else here use this NAS? Am I in for problems I didn't discover in my research, or were there perhaps past issues with ReadyNAS that have been addressed? I noticed the older XRAID scheme seemed to have a limitation where it could only build volumes based on the smallest disk size in the array, but XRAID2 appears capable of utilizing the extra space on bigger drives as they're added, just like Drobo.<br /> <br /> Anyway, I figured I'd share my ease-of-use experience since that was a big part of this review. I'm happy with my choice (ReadyNAS Pro 6) and hope your Drobo FS continues to work out. I really do like Drobo, and it looks more slick than my NAS, but since it lives in another room anyway the looks are less important.