Don't agree with review's findings

One of my companies has used an NV+ (same configuration: 4x250MB) for the past nine months. In that time, it has behaved faultlessly. We use X-Raid, and don't see the point in anything else: after all, that's what Infrant/NetGear designed it for, and it's not as if you'd use the disk set in any other device.

The major win as far as we are concerned is NFS (Network File System) support, which just about no other RAIDs in its class has. This is essential for an office that has a mix of Linux/Unix, Mac and Windows machines. Sorry but CIFS alone just doesn't cut it in a professional mixed-OS environment.

Our only complaint is that, as supplied, the NV+ doesn't operate as a heterogeneous authentication (RADIUS) server as well, which would make it a one-box machine room for many companies.

Business Use

Good review and yes this device is quite quirky. We are a ~150 desktop local gov shop and have an NV+ from before the Netgear acquisition. We use the X-RAID format due to issues you mentioned ;) Another funny low point is their recommendation to reverse the flow of the cooling fan to improve cooling of the system board. What they failed to consider is that now the intake air is not filtered and dust buildup will be a problem. We decided to take our chances with thermal failure and not do the fan reversal, esp. since it operates in a A/C controlled server room.

We use this device as a cheap disk->disk NL storage and backup. One huge plus you forgot to mention is the rsync capability (hopefully not gone in the latest release). This can save a good deal of bandwidth when backing up things over a slower WAN connection.

Also, a close scouring of the forums will reveal that the CPU in this device is a very slow and old 32-bit SPARC. It's too bad, since a modern ARM CPU would likely be much faster. People have upgraded the RAM to 1GB to improve performance.

It's been awhile since I futzed with Linux, but from trawling the logs I believe their RAID is just software LVM RAID. I doubt that sparc has the muscle to do HW RAID5 off a 1Gb connection anyway so no real loss. Their "proprietary X-RAID" may not even be proprietary at all...might just be some interesting scripts that control rebuilding and servicing plain jane raid levels. It's very interesting to see the benchmarked differences in performance.

Now that they've officially added the SSH access I hope that some alternative firmware can be created, much like the OpenWRT series for routers.

Hmmm

I just purchased its 1U cousin, the ReadyNAS 1100.

Even though X-RAID is attractive, I really intend to use RAID-5 on this unit because of the extra reliability of having a hot-spare, albeit at the cost of less space.

But I'll try to perform reliability tests to verify that it can rebuild the array properly. Otherwise, hot-spare or not, it's not reliable at all.