Another ReadyNAS or something else?

I guess you'll get opinions based on one's own experience. In my case, I have a 3 year old Duo and a 9 month old NV+ v2. I stayed with Netgear because, well just because it was what I chose first time and it has not let me down. I use both units at home with relatively lightweight use. File serving mostly.

I am however troubled by many recent changes to how Netgear handle customers.

However, from what I've read the new OS (6.x) doesn't appear to be quite ready for primetime.

For sure this is not too robust.

I expect that Netgear will eventually iron it out

Well, if they introduce another new hardware upgrade, they will drop support for the current units like a brick, i.e. Duo/NV+ v2 units are no longer getting upgrades. This is really poor, especially since the v5.3 sw was never "finished" in the sense of all the features you'd reasonably expect to have.

I'd like to hear if anyone has any insight into its competitors (e.g., Synology, Thecus, and QNAP), although they seem to have issues too.

Personally I like the look of QNAP, but Synology appear to have the better software package. I say appear because I have no experience and I've really sifted through their respective forums. Maybe the grass is not greener!

The post royalef "My worry with synology is in the bad reviews I read. Most of them catalog failures that ended with a complete loss of all data", which would be very bad indeed :( . I've not seen this anywhere, but I haven't looked that hard yet.