Ordering a ReadyNAS with any disk EXCEPT Western Digital?

I personally am brand agnostic for that exact reason, I pick the drive that seems the best suited at the time for the use I plan to make of it or which has the best price/warranty.
I would typically balance my disks between the two brands if I had some bulk update to do (main storage on a brand, backup on another).
What would make a real difference is the efficiency of the customer support though. I can admit that a product fails, I just can't admit that it takes a month to replace a disk for example. A bad customer experience ruins my trust in a company in just a second.

Customer service of course matters a lot.

In my specific case, multiple drive failures in rapid succession cost me some data, which matters even more. Fortunately I was able to recover most of it. One response was to get a NAS, a second response was to discontinue use of optical media for backup (some of which also turned out to be unreadable), the third response was to switch to WDC.

I'll stay with WDC until they give me a reason not to.

Fair enough ;)
I just wanted to notice the order in which you did the things. You went from primary failure (disk failure), to secondary failure (backup failure) to a less probable source of failure (assuming all Seagate have the same flaw).
I stop before the last step. I consider that at some point both manufacturers will have flawed products and I try to have products from different models/brands/batch to reduce the impacted devices.
I don't believe that either of us is right or wrong on this, we just made different assumptions. I thought that we should have, once again, stressed the backup part, and that's why I wanted to highlight the order you chose to go with.

xeltros wrote:

Fair enough ;) I just wanted to notice the order in which you did the things. You went from primary failure (disk failure), to secondary failure (backup failure) to a less probable source of failure (assuming all Seagate have the same flaw). I stop before the last step. I consider that at some point both manufacturers will have flawed products and I try to have products from different models/brands/batch to reduce the impacted devices. I don't believe that either of us is right or wrong on this, we just made different assumptions. I thought that we should have, once again, stressed the backup part, and that's why I wanted to highlight the order you chose to go with.

Generally I agree. Though we do disagree on the odds of the Seagate's being a cause of the failure. :-) This did happen some years ago, and perhaps reliability has changed since then.

Are there any approved Solid-State-Drives for the 312 or 314???

Yes. See http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20641

I'm sure I read somewhere that WD had bought out Seagate anyway, so they are probably effectively the same technology and factories producing both brands by now. I have found Seagate Constellation drives to be very reliable in the past, although they really do not like sudden power loss as I had two develop bad sectors from power cuts (in a ReadyNAS Duo V1 on a UPS), after this I upgraded my UPS and several power cuts later have not had a repeat failure since. I have also used Samsung and IBM drives in single external disk enclosures without any problems.

No, SeaGate and WD are the two big players left standing in the hard drive market.

SeaGate bought Samsung's hard drive division and Western Digital bought Hitachi.