Netgear falling behind?

You might want to blame the floods, manufacturer consolidation and the fact that they seem to bring out a new drive model every six months. It's kind of like the way automobiles used to be. There was a Ford and a Chevy. Now it 5 or six models of each. In the old days there was a single Seagate model for each size and a single WD model for each size, now there are many. Even in the last year they have proliferated. When I bought my first 3TB drives a year ago there were about 8 listed on Newegg, even just a few months ago there were only 12, now there are 46. You can generally find a drive that fits your need on the list, you may just have to hunt for it or go to a different brand. Without knowing your specifics, it is hard to give concrete examples.

If you want the most powerful NAS on the market, the ReadyNAS Pro 6 is generally considered to hold that honor in the desktop market. It uses a dual core Intel E5300 2.6 GHz chip that will more than saturate a 1Gb ethernet connection. However, it does not have the USB 3 connection as that standard was released after the model was developed. The Pro 2, the last of the new Pro series (a 2 bay model) does have a USB 3 port on the front where your Duo has a USB 2 port. (Same is true for the Ultra and Ultra Plus series.

In the few times that I actually copy to a USB drive I tend to use a USB port on my PC (far handier and I can use a file manager to copy the exact files/folders I want). Personally, for backups of a 6 bay NAS with large drives, the USB ports are useless, as are the eSATA ports on some competitors. There is no way you can backup up 12TB of data to anything other than another NAS.